PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH

 

People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather

 

Buddhists of Lakeland

At Ulverston in the lower Lake District, not far from the place that gave birth to Stan Laurel (see his Hollywood gravestone below), is an imposing pile of a place dedicated to the teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. This is Conishead Priory. When I first visited it in the late 1970's, structural decay had eaten the heart of it, but many hands were bringing about a transformation. There were monks and nuns and Tibetan teachers, and prayer flags flew at the entrance: an international gathering of seekers, sightseers, seers; flotsam in the miasma of a shared conscience. You could feel the goodness and an anxiety to please.

One Buddhist seeker, an English youth, had used bad language because of some physical mishap, and was devastated to have done so in those surroundings. "I polluted the atmosphere for yards around me," he said in his agony. No easy path, you see. Later, he would have to cope with the teaching that thought thinks and that there is no thinker behind the thought - a view directly opposed to that of Descartes, who concluded, "I think, therefore I am."

A Zen Buddhist - Zen being the ascent of the spiritual mountain by the steepest path - was teaching a gaggle of people the art of walking meditation; everything very earnest. I took my young son there and he sat in the front row of a group of Buddhists, all listening to two wise Tibetans who chanted away and occasionally threw small clouds of flour into the air as a form of benediction on their congregation. The boy was totally absorbed and covered in flour. When the service ended, he picked up a handful of flour and, without a word, threw it at the teachers - geshes in Buddhist language. They rocked about with laughter.
Comfortable people to be with, I thought. Very dedicated, the followers, for how long one did not know. For some, a passing enthusiasm, for others, a lifelong commitment.

My wife and I stayed there one week-end in winter and cheated by sneaking in our own electric blanket. The cold was vicious in that old building. In the middle of the night I ventured into a long corridor. When I returned, I had the startling vision of a robed Buddhist in meditational posture on a raised platform etched in dim light at the point where the corridor terminated. We smiled at each other and said nothing as I passed.

Vegetarian meals of great variety were served. Wonderful to get up in a morning and join the throng for thick toast, made by laying it on the fiercely hot top of a stove; all kinds of jams and marmalades and treacles there.
But what was it all about? For me, it was a gentle exercise in seeking; for many, a total dedication, dominating lives to the exclusion of all else.

They had come from all over the world, these monks and nuns: Feather Meston from Los Angeles, Jim Dougherty from Chicago, Kathleen McDonald from Sacramento, George Churinoff from Chicago, Sylviane Shaw from Casablanca, Dieter Kratzer from Bavaria, Steve Carlier from Hampshire, Helmut Hohm from Munich, and many more.

They were to spread all over the world, too, finding truths within themselves, finding others with whom to share a truth. Many of them were former members of the flower power movements washing out from California. Flower power did not provide a lasting answer and many who were affected by this evidence of universal love became re-absorbed in conventional society; but others spread out to Greece, to Spain, to Nepal to deepen their search and many ended here, in the lower Lakes, at this splendid place.
George Churinoff became the monk Thubten Tsultim and was one of the most highly-regarded members of his community. George had encountered a moral dilemma.

"This train had stopped outside a town in India and there was no station. Some people were getting off. I looked out of the window and saw a makeshift toilet, a cement wall with holes in the bottom. Garbage would come down on the track side. There were some pigs, very large, grubbing about and I thought: This is too much. It couldn't happen in America. How dirty these people are...
"A man getting off the train was robed. He might have been a Buddhist monk or just a wandering ascetic. He had a long staff, and was very old; and as he was slowly alighting, some young boys, 16 or 17 years of age, took his staff away. I was angry. My mind snapped. I said, `Give back the cane.' The boy with the cane came to hit me. His friends stood by, laughing. I decided to get off the train and teach him a lesson. I was going to take the cane back from him and give it back to its owner. But the boy began to beat me with the cane. The welts were painful. I did not have much chance to stop the blows. My face was bleeding. My arms was badly bruised. The boy ran down the side of the train with the cane. I had been humiliated. I made one last futile gesture: I picked up a stone and threw it at him. All the people watching were impassive, uninvolved.

"There was incredible anger in me. I got some first-aid, what seemed like a 20-year-old aspirin and a dirty bandage and went back to the carriages. The train was about to leave. A wandering ascetic was sitting on the floor near the lavatory in the train. His hair was matted. There were ashes on his body and he wore a loin cloth. His eyes suggested that he was probably drugged. I looked at him. He did not seem particularly happy that I was upset. I felt that, maybe there was some rapport.

"`Why?' I said to him, hands outstretched. `Why?' And he said, `Karma.' The law of cause and effect. I was quite surprised, quite taken. I remembered some years before reading books about Buddhism that mentioned karma. To receive love, one had to love. Maybe this WAS karma. I do not know what happened to the man whose stick was taken. He left the train, a lost cause. I headed for Kathmandu and a meditation centre.."

George travelled around various Buddhist centres and ten years later was to contacted through a centre at Pisa in Italy. I suppose he still vividly recalls the sermon of the stick! And there you have the crux of the problem: it is all very well having quiet, contemplative thoughts in monasteries, but another matter having to face the world as it is. Meditation in simple serenity with others of like mind encourages one to believe that progression is faster than reality might ultimately suggest. The test lies in turmoil. I often wonder how George Churinoff would face the same circumstances now. Perhaps he does, too.

The most outgoing nun at the Manjushri Institute was a slightly-built liquid-eyed American girl, effervescent with energy, named Feather Meston; she became Thubten Wongmo. Her grandmother, who knew people such as Hemingway, Aldous Huxley and Scott Fitzgerald, became a great hostess and ended in Shanghai with a millionaire, her fourth husband. Feather's father created the radio programme Gunsmoke and wrote the TV series. Her parents divorced. "I had two years at school in Newark, living with my father and his second wife, a lady bullfighter. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor. The whole thing was very glamorous. We spent two summers in Spain, the three of us, met Hemingway, drank Pernod in all the cafes, and went to all the bullfights."
Later, she was to view that section of life with distaste.

She went to Los Angeles. "There were two sides to life in the Los Angeles sixties so far as I could see. There was the side opening up with drugs, people expanding the consciousness and exploring the mind and so on; but also, there was a sense of not wishing to be sheep following society's old ways. Many were not interested in becoming wealthy businessmen, living a life that had no meaning."

She was later to see this era as "a false dawn." She met an artist who became her husband. They were dissatisfied with Los Angeles and began to seek for a better reality, first in New Mexico, then Europe.

"I was pregnant. I had my bit of money (from her mother, who had, by that time, committed suicide). We lived in Spain for a year and did not find the answer to our spiritual problems. I was disappointed with the people, the environment. My husband just kept painting pictures. He did not care where he was. A room, some paint, and he was off... We stayed in Geneva for a while and there, I had the baby. Finally we ended in Greece, in a small fishing village in the northern part of Corfu. There, we almost seemed to find the answer. Olive trees, beaches, Greek women, so loving, and giving, and family-conscious and motherly."

She felt within herself "a great yearning for the spiritual life. It was almost beyond my will. I must have been around 27 years old. It was all I could think about." India beckoned. "We took off in our Volkswagen van, with all our belongings and the baby, a beautiful boy. We went to Dharemsala, where the Tibetans were. The moment I saw a Tibetan lama named Geshe Nauwang Dargey I realised I had met someone enlightened, a feeling beyond words.

"On one occasion, monks were chanting for hours with the Dalai Lama at the head of them. I was praying as I went around a temple. Then I would come and sit and watch the puja (offering ceremony) from the outside again. I had never seen so many monks in one place chanting like that. I was very moved by the energy. As I was going around saying my prayers, I thought: I want to become a nun. This had never come into my mind before. It was very powerful. It gave me a jolt.

"I knew from that moment flint I would be a nun in this lifetime. I thought: Well, I'm married. My husband would not like the idea very much. I was picturing life as an old lady: I'd be a nun and I'd be able to say rny prayers and chant like the monks were doing, all the time.

"We argued so much, rny husband arid me, that we had a difficult time relating to each other. He had his own personal problems. We agreed to separate. The day after he left the house, I asked my guru, Nauwang Dargey, whether I might become a nun. He gave permission." Initiation involved a retreat of around three months and she wished to go into the mountains to do it. "I needed some kind of care for my child, and a beautiful Tibetan family in Kathmandu agreed to keep him for me while I was away. The father had been a monk in Tibet. He was a close disciple of a very high lama. The lama had predicted his own death. He also said that the father of the Tibetan farnily, whose name was Janpa Thinlay, would be his vehicle in his next life. The lama died around the time of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Janpa Thinlay gave up his ordination, married two sisters, left Tibet, and went to Nepal where they had ten children. One of the children is the incarnation of the lama.

"It was good that my son should go to such a family. After I returned from retreat, the family decided to accept my son. I was just half an hour away, at the monastery, doing my studies and meditation. Here was a better kind of living situation both for my son and for me. By the time he was six, he became a monk and studied at Larna Yeshe's school. His Tibetan is excellent, his English not so good. I-le is getting well educated and the lama is taking care of him and 80 other boys. I-Ic; would not want to be anywhere else, and maybe he will eventually become a teacher of dhomia (spiritual teachings)."

That was 1978. We kept up a kind of desultory correspondence. Ten years on, in 1989, she was still a nun, having; taken full ordination in Hong Kong in 1988. She built a "nice, comfortable house at our retreat centre in Dharamsala." Then came a three- year retreat. "I was locked up for a year and a half in my retreat house, locked up by Lama Yeshe to ensure that I stayed in. It was the most amazing time of my life. I came to cherish solitude and the calmness of mind it provided for my meditation. Then Indira Ghandi was assassinated and the visa law changed and I had to leave India. I continued a retreat in Nepal, visited Tibet, taught Buddhism in Hong Kong, led some retreats, and finally managed to get a long-term Indian visa... As a Buddhist, I have a chance to learn how to deal with my mind and life so there is constant improvement, hope and joy.....

The last I heard of her, in November, 1993, she was teaching in Chicago. I mentioned George Churinoff's problem and how lie might view it now. "Ask him," she said, and provided a forwarding address in California.

Steve Carlier, who had once wished to be a nuclear engineer, went to Nalanda Monastery at Labastide St Georges in France as the monk Thubten Sherab; Dieter Kratzer, who had studied computer technology in Canada, was said to be teaching at a Buddhist centre in Australia; Sylviane Shaw, once a Catholic, went to Kathmandu as Losang Wangmo..

Few people on this earth know the kinds of soul-searchings that have gone on at Ulverston. I am glad to have observed some small part of it.

George Churinoff's experience with the. staff is, in retrospect, no different from that of the Dalai Lama. The spiritual leader was forced out of Tibet by the Chinese in the fifties. As he stood by impotently, they proceeded to beat his people, or worse. The exile goes on. The West, which is at great pains to correct injustices elsewhere providing that it suits its purpose, continues to ignore the Tibetan dilemma; and so Western leaders are the cynical watchers on the train.

But although there is this dilemma of the exiled Tibetans with their ancient beliefs and wisdoms, the flower of that country's knowledge has been scattered by the diaspora throughout Western society, and the Feather Mestons and George Churinoffs have provided the settling grounds for a new flowering.

From tragedy, hope; from bad, good.

Perhaps George Churinoff's lesson is that all is not what it appears to be at the time; and out of experience comes wisdom. A physicist might call it the order of chaos.

Geoffrey Mather © 2004

30 March, 2008