In Praise of My First Buddhist Mentor

I have been lucky in terms of my connection to the dharma in the sense that I encountered it when Tibetan Lamas where not yet roaming from one well endowed and opulently decorated dharma center to the other across the Americas and in Europe dispensing, from their thrones of course, droplets of their tradition to a generally, at least to all appearances devout audience; when there was hardly any tantric practice text translated, especially correctly, into my mother language, except for the Buddha’s teachings as preserved in the Pali canon; when there were only a handful authentic western Buddhist to be found like the proverbial needles in the haystack, and after some effort in searching them out.  Yet, despite the apparent lack in everything – no lineage teachers, not much literature, and no dharma centers - I still call this situation as it presented itself, a blessing in disguise, not a deficiency.

Why do I call it a blessing?  Because it helped me to learn and embody the dharma slowly from the ground up, from my home ground that is, from the rich musical, literary and even oral heritage of my country of birth (which hadn’t been inundated and crushed yet under US TV non-culture at the time, to the point it is now).  This slow development in the dharma through a lot of improvising has been a source of great inner strength and conviction.  It made the dharma feel home grown and not something foreign, that I need to adopt and adapt to.  I didn’t have to twist my soul into becoming a dharma practitioner.  I became one by being myself. 

Naturally, my first Buddhist mentors were from the same stock.  They all were of my parents’ age, or just a few years younger or older, and they were solid professionals  - doctors, lawyers, psychotherapists – not ‘dharma practitioners’ for money.  I had differences of opinion, even fought with them over some issues, of course, as young people have to fight with their elders.  The battle cry of my generation, after all was, “Question Authority!” Not “OBEY”, as I have seen printed on some baseball caps and T-shirts recently.   But in essence, all of these relationships were based on mutual respect and trust.  I trusted my mentors because they were real people, the least bit bothered about fulfilling any role model expectations.  They had practiced dharma in the trenches of World War II, or when sitting in bomb shelters, or in exile.  Their understanding had grown from some real exposure to some real suffering, not only from reading books, or from mimicking or imitating the flamboyant style of some high lamas (with whom and neither with their behavior as they appear now, do I have any issue).

After I had taken refuge in January 1974 through one of Lama Govinda’s dharma groups in Germany, I was assigned a mentor.  The role of the mentor was to guide me in the dharma and answer my questions to the best of his abilities.  Lama Govinda had given these mentors a name.  According to Mahayana tradition, they called them kalyanamitras, which they indeed were: friends in everything wholesome, sharing what is wholesome.  My mentor was Dr. Friedrich Kaufmann, who happened to live in the same small university town of Marburg where I, together with my then girlfriend Susy Clemens had just started to study Sanskrit, Tibetan and the Science of Comparative Religion.  Dr. Kaufmann’s dharma name was Vasubadhu.  My dharma name was Sunaga.  We called each other by our dharma names, not by our given names.  By doing so, the context for our relationship was always clear. 

Dr. Kaufmann (for me, after some time and hesitation, always Vasubandhu) was a doctor by profession, the retired director of his hometown’s Public Health Department, and a trained psychotherapist (who had actually briefly worked both with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung at some point in his life).  He was still practicing a Jungian form of psychotherapy, helping mostly students through their troubles with life for the modest fee of DM 10 (or US $ 5) per hour, because the student health insurance plan only reimbursed that much for psychotherapy.  But for Vasubadhu anything connected with ‘healing’ was considered ‘sacred’ (in a very natural not in an ego inflated way): he saw it purely as a service, not a money making proposition.  For us students it was a sweet deal.  Where in the world would you get an hour of therapy with someone who had trained some with both Freud and Jung?

At first I was a bit reserved, about to decide that I shouldn’t connect too much with my assigned mentor because he appeared ‘too ordinary’, too ‘old generation German’.  In short, he didn’t appear hip enough, and especially Susy held this lack of outward ‘coolness’ against him. 

Well, we had it quite wrong.  He was anything but – and very extraordinary too, even ‘cool’ in his own way; very old school German, yes, but old Jewish German cool, 19^th century style.  His Buddhist teachings sometimes sounded an awful lot like Schopenhauer, whom he quoted a lot, and he definitely knew his Spinoza, the whole of the European classics in fact.  But as I stated in the introduction, this was anything but a flaw, or an impediment – more like a bridge I could cross from my own cultural heritage to another cultural heritage, meeting it on equal terms, learning how to meet someone or something apparently foreign with devotion, but still on equal footing.  Indeed, immensely useful.

Vasubandhu (and from now on I will call him only by his dharma name) took the initiative.  He invited Susy and I to his home for coffee and cake one Sunday afternoon, another old-fashioned very German tradition.  He used the time to introduce him and his family properly and also talked about his background. 

His family was from Marburg (a small place about 150 kilometers northeast of Frankfurt), his wife’s family from Berlin.  His father-in-law had been a Professor for Sanskrit in Berlin and shot himself when the Nazis took away his tenure.  His wife and he had survived from 1938 in Swiss exile, in the region of Appenzell, only three kilometers from the German border.  His brother-in-law miraculously hadn’t been deported, but (although having a doctorate in Egyptology) had survived the war as a gravedigger in Berlin.  In 1974, by the way, he was Professor Jacobsohn and the Head of the Egyptology department at Marburg’s Philip’s University.  Yes, some family members had died in the camps, but others like themselves had emigrated before, and his brother-in-law, of course, had been most lucky by surviving in the lion’s den, in Berlin itself. 

You can imagine the impact so much truth had: all of this and more on a Sunday afternoon over coffee and cake.  I felt a bit guilty by association, perhaps, although there was no reason for me to feel any guilt, having been born after the war. 

Remarkably, there was not the least bit of anger, let alone malice in Vasubadhu’s voice when he recounted his life’s story.  His wife was very sweet, too, a practicing Quaker, not a practicing Jew.  The daughter dropped in to say “Hi”.  She was a little older than us and herself had a daughter from a messed up marriage with a US officer.  The granddaughter was half black.  Later I learned how much Vasubadhu doted on her.  She was quite naughty, too, and absolutely unashamed of her mixed heritage, which was not as common in the early 1970s as it might be now.  Probably, she could be and act so cocksure because she was so much loved.

I believe I asked Vasubandhu then and there, or I might have asked that question also later, “But why, did you decide to came back after the war and live here, considering what you had gone through?”  He didn’t give the Buddhist textbook answer, along the lines of “Samsara is suffering, everywhere.”  His answer was much more elaborate and personal.   

He said, and I remember it very well, “I was the last Jew to have my doctoral thesis approved by the University of Marburg, just before the Nuremberg racial laws came into effect, in 1935.  I had it printed and it was displayed in the window of the local academic printing press then.  When I came back visiting for the first time in 1946, it was still displayed there, in the same window.  I took this as a sign, meaning that, after all, this was my hometown and I belonged.”  His wife interjected, “Yes, I agreed but insisted that he join the public health service rather than going into private practice.  With his huge heart, my husband would have treated everyone for free and we would have starved.”  Vasubandhu first laughed (he laughed often) and added, “We are German through and through, and the pine trees don’t smell the same anywhere else.  The Hitlers come and go.  Throughout the ages people were persecuted and killed everywhere, for their racial background and for their faith.  At our time it happened here.  Next time it will happen somewhere else.  So, why go somewhere else!  Besides I was too lazy to study the same medicine again in English, because we would have immigrated to the US, that I had studied in German fifteen years earlier.  Here I could make myself useful and be of service right away.”

Really, I can only sing praises for this man, my Buddhist mentor Vasubadhu – because he was teaching Buddhism with his whole heart, actually in his actions through his whole life, at least in the few short years that I had the privilege to know him.  Despite his own lack of formal dharma training, he had and was able to convey the experience of non-duality, which had the power to cut through deeply.  It derived from his long years of practice as a therapist.  He understood the phantasmagoria of the mind, the paradox of their being nothing, and yet there being a presence, and he was able to share it.

I last saw him in early summer 1978.  He had just been operated for cancer of the throat and had to speak through a microphone.  Myself, I was on my way to the airport to fly to San Francisco and attend the summer programs at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, and to complete my German translation of Tarthang Tulku’s book Gestures of Balance. In my mind I aleardy sat in the plane, and wasn't really present during the visit.  I never returned to Marburg thereafter, as in 1978 I already lived in Hamburg.  The Buddhist circle in Wiesbaden also had dissolved or morphed into something else, now promoting Chogyam Trungpa rather than Lama Govinda.  So, with me becoming a student of sorts of Tarthang Tulku’s, the link had been severed. 

But still, it was my fault, never to enquire after Vasubandhu again in order to express my deep felt gratitude for his mentoring, which had lasted for only three short years.  Naturally, the young have less qualms about such things.  I moved on and and didn’t look back.

However, not looking back does not mean forgetting altogether.   

From today's vista, this life’s path feels like made all of one taste.  To a certain degree, I differentiate between my gurus and mentors, yes, but I would never say, that, “I first studied with this one, then I left to study with that one, then I left and studied with the third one, and so forth.”  No matter how different their styles, all of these teachers are the one continuum, one rain of blessings.

Feeling equal, I bow before them. 

Lama Govinda and Vasubandhu (and a few others unnamed for the time being) were special insofar as they were the first in a long line of remarkable people that I was fortunate to meet over the course of a lifetime.

I bow again.

My apologies, but I truly don’t have any picture of dear Vasubadhu's in my possession.  Otherwise I would have shared it.  In its place I put a picture of Vasubandhu's teacher Lama Anagarika Govinda, who was also my inspiration and whom I met many times in Germany, India and Mill Valley, California.