Bon Voyage, Gyatrul Rinpoche

[Tara]

Bon Voyage, Gyatrul Rinpoche
by Charles Carreon, 2/12/2025

Last year, 2024, Gyatrul Rinpoche died at his home in Half Moon Bay, California. He was 93. Thanks to Tara Thomas, who sent me a video of the event, I saw the funeral cortege driving down Colestine Road, through the gates of Tashi Choling, from Tara's POV in her car, parked by the roadside, incense smoke drifting across the dashboard, a recorded puja playing in the background. I had to chuckle when she told me that Rinpoche had asked to have a burial at sea, rather than having his body cremated in the classic style, which usually results in the "discovery" of "precious relics" in the remaining ashes, which are then of course enshrined and venerated like real spiritual currency. He apparently didn't want people venerating a body he knew damn well was made of ordinary human clay, and preferred to have it dined upon by fishes. Tell me he didn't know how to annoy the orthodox.

I wrote this a few months ago, last year, but didn't have the impulse to post until today, when I woke up at 4 AM, meditated for an hour, and suddenly wanted to post. Maybe because the other day, I read a transcript of some comments Rinpoche made a couple of years ago, while watching some of his students teaching new students. He was pleased and excited, and urged everyone to share Dharma knowledge of all types. Typical Gyatrul Rinpoche stuff – “Teach other people how to make tormas, if that’s all you know how to do! Don’t be stingy! Share what you know!” Well, I do not know how to make tormas, although I ate a few really tasty ones at Dudjom Rinpoche’s birthday celebration in San Anselmo, circa 1981 or so, about all we did eat, along with Matthew Small and Caroline’s family, being the poorest damn hippies at the event, with our rattletrap cars and wide-eyed kids. Really all I am probably competent to teach is whatever you can learn from stories about Gyatrul Rinpoche, because even though I spent twenty years away from him physically before he died, he nurtured my growth from an allegedly sweet, naïve hippie to a dangerously cynical, troublesome Dharma student. How did this happen?

Tara, our son Joshua (two years old), and I met Rinpoche in a conference room at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland. In the mid-sized event room, with maybe thirty or forty people attending, he invited us to sit up close to him. We instantly felt his kindness extending us refuge from the fairly harsh reality of being a poor hippie family, rich only in sincere naivete about virtually all of life, discovering the route to daily survival by painful experimentation. Both Tara and I had functional moral compasses that drew us to him. Rinpoche gave Tara a rose from among the flowers someone had offered to his presence. She was pregnant with Maria, whose presence Rinpoche referred to often and with evident delight, telling people with profound philosophical questions that "You should ask Tara's baby that question." This was a typical Gyatrul Rinpoche tantric riposte to Western intellectual challenges.

Tara and I, and eventually our whole family became Gyatrul Rinpoche devotees because he was sincere and innocent about his offering of Dharma. He never suggested it would be a path to worldly riches or fame. Dharma scorned power and status games in pursuit of self-respect, integrity, and the right relationship to others and all living beings. Once he said to me, "There were three monasteries in Tibet that were known to have faultless Dorje Phurba practice, and when the Chinese came, they didn't even try to conquer them. They just smash!" He crashed his right fist into his left palm as he said this, as his face twisted into an ironic grin. He seemed to be telling me that the very highest honor you may receive in this world for extraordinarily meritorious Dharma practice could be a martyr's death.

Rinpoche and I used to wander on walks through all the acreage in and around his newly-acquired Colestine property in the early 1980s. It was all originally land that had flown the Rainbow Star banner, and as he got his teams of practitioners activated, he eventually placed mandalas of prayer flags on upright wooden poles at the borders to sanctify the sacred retreat place where Dudjom Rinpoche, depicted below blessing the treasure bumpa he buried at the summit of the Tashi Choling land. That's our Joshua absorbing the significance of it all, lower right.

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From left: Pema Wangyal, Dudjom Rinpoche, Marti Ambrose, Shenphen Dawa, Linda Herreschoff.

Rinpoche loved his land. When the deal got nailed down -- 47 acres at $20K -- Rinpoche was stoked. We were having teachings in the Dharma Center on "B" Street in Ashland, Oregon, and he was smiling broadly, joking as he sat on the throne, teaching Dharma in a very relaxed fashion. He conceded that "People might say Gyatrul is talking about his land like a guy talks about his new girlfriend, and that would be true." I knew it was true from walking around on the land with him. I had been the real estate agent from Akanishtha the first day I escorted him around the acreage, assuming there are monkeys in Akanishtha, which as Rinpoche kept remarking I appeared to be. That wasn't actually fanciful, because I was in my early twenties, a self-conceived tai chi and yoga adept, and exhibited monkey-like ability to clamber up and down the numerous tilting alders that lined Cottonwood Creek, flowing a big current of muddy snowmelt that was undermining the trees at a speedy rate. It was a beautiful day, and Rinpoche, Tara and I were in a magical realm together. I wanted him to appreciate the awesome beauty of the place, and he did. That communication was very solid. It was like, "We love this place. Let's live here."

Of course, Tara and the kids and I already lived in Colestine. Our yurt, shown below, was a source of good fun for Rinpoche. The circular wall was built from an accordion of extremely fine 2x2 six-footers, the windows were plexiglass trapezoids, the walls tilted outwards at the top, and the door was a huge trapezoid that our friend Matthew called "the ankle breaker."

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Rinpoche thought the design was hilarious. One day, he used our yurt to illustrate his teaching us Kye Rim for the first time in Ashland, a big teaching that was very detailed and precise. This practice involves, of course, visualizing the world transformed into a realm of pure illusory appearance, composed of light visible only to your transcendental vision. The world is a vast, flat circular mandala roofed over with a jeweled celestial canopy, all apparent objects and beings are self-luminous, and there are no material objects to be externally illuminated. The center of the world is the Palace of great bliss, at the center of a vast mandala of Palaces, all filled with pure, peaceful, enlightened forms and beings. The world can be called Akanishtha, the purest realm of form in the worlds of form. Not knowing any of this, I just asked Rinpoche what the Palace of great bliss looked like, so I could visualize it accurately.

Rinpoche grinned like he had seen an opportunity to say something really funny. He squinted a little to explain, and Sanghe Khandro, a very good facsimile of a goddess, whose presence next to Rinpoche provided the right atmosphere, translated his words. "It's round," he said, making a circle with his hands. "And the walls, they tilt in like this," he continued, "And the windows are shaped like this," he said as brought his index fingers together and traced out a trapezoidal shape. "If you want to know what the gods and goddesses look like," he suggested, "they are kind of funny," he said with a mischievous smile. First he described Tara -- "There's one very skinny, tall blonde one," then he went on to describe Maria and Joshua -- "there are two little ones, the smaller one, the little girl is very round and the little boy is very quiet." Everyone had a good laugh, because the group was small, and many of those present had actually seen the yurt, some envying us our pious poverty, others our place on the land, close to the shingle-covered pyramid where Rinpoche had taken up residence for occasional retreats.

Today, Rinoche's teaching using my house as an anology couldn't be clearer. He was telling me to use my imagination to see the world as it really is. He was saying, "Charles, your wife and children are deities. You are a deity. Get into the spiritual reality." Boy, I definitely did not get it. I'm sure he knew he was knocking on a croquet ball when he spoke to me. It's so hard to conceive what he's saying. Kye Rim (visualization) practice is a leap of imagination from delusion into truth. That's how I see it now. Back then, not so much. I could not see what I was looking for when it was directly in front of my nose, because in fact I had no idea what I was looking for. I am sure Rinpoche was aware of that, but he taught all of us that day, anyway, hoping no doubt that some day the understanding would ripen our minds. That's compassion -- he knew the limits of our Dharma understanding, but he didn't scorn or belittle, he didn't try and sell us a Dharma fix, he didn't tell us he was the answer. He just urged us to do what we could to be decent people first, to act honestly and sow the seeds of a happy future, and to trust in practice to quiet the mind, so through contemplation we could reach the confidence and peace of actual understanding.

Rinpoche was not without pride, as I saw on several occasions -- a border guard in Tijuana made him visibly prickly when he implied that all the other people in the car were citizens, and he pulled his passport from the folds of his robe with an attitude of injured nobility and extended it to the agent while saying in a sibilant, angry tone that pulled the words our a syllable at a time, "American citizen." When Chagdud Tulku redid the face of Vajrasattva, replacing the original Dzogchen-gaze created by Ngudrup Rangae with the very androgynous features he now wears, Rinpoche was incensed, fulminating to me as he sat on his cushion in the pyramid, looking down at where the Eugene lama was still completing his takeover of the deity's appearance. "I just wanted him to do the hands, that we had a little trouble with. The face was done! And he redoes it and doesn't even look at the hands!" He was furious, but I don't think he told too many people about it. Tara and I were clearly not Chagdud sympathizers, even though he had given us 10 days of Troma teachings, because Chagdud would never give us the briefest indication of interest. I think we had flashing signs over our head that said, "Property of Yeshe Nyingpo."

It would be hard to describe the insular focus of our lives in the years when we lived on the Tashi Choling temple land, but for a couple of years, it was really a householder yogi scene, and a lot of people came to visit. For a place with no running water, electricity, or flush toilet, we got more visitors than you would believe. The Yeshe Lama retreat, that Rinpoche hosted and Lama Gonpo Tseden administered, was the first retreat that took place on the land, Forty people came out one summer to pitch tents uphill from what would become the temple hill, practicing secret Nyingma practices that, if sounds carried on the breeze from the retreatant's camp down to our yurt provide reliable evidence, involved hooting and hollering like wild animals. In what now resonates as a suspiciously-convenient "tradition" that Gonpo Tseden (whose own translator, Cho Ying, was a woman even more endowed than Sanghe Khandro) may have invented, the people who received the initiation were required to display their bare breasts to the lama. Additionally, we were advised to keep up the tradition of giving the empowering lama our entire stash of accumulated gold. We didn't have any, but Tara lost some dimestore jewelry in the exchange, and it ended up draped on one of the young Dharma children, presumably when the lama found out it was just cheap silver.

Rinpoche's cachet as a teacher was slow in catching on. There were lean years in the beginning, before Rinpoche began tapping the wealthy Chinese of Taipei, and the largesse of other donors. He was every bit as poor as we were, and we were absolutely dirt poor. Rinpoche's automobile in those days was a Ford Pinto wagon with a bumpersticker on it that said, "I'd rather be riding a mule on Molokai." Our Sangha practically had to rub two sticks together to make a fire, we were so primitive. The Dharma sure weren't getting any substantial money from the people who showed up at B Street to practice, because we didn't have any. We weren't even dope growers. We were poor, idealistic intellectuals without credentials, with children who had all been wet-nursed by sundry hippie moms. Rinpoche didn't have the loose style that made Chagdud Tulku successful with the Eugene hippies. Chagdud drank beer, sang songs, made sculpture, paintings, prayer wheels, all kinda groovy stuff. Rinpoche just had the Dharma, and for some of us that was precisely what made him so attractive.

One day, Tara and I had a hard decision to make regarding Rinpoche. He was scheduled to teach up in Eugene and share a stage with Joan Halifax and Ram Dass in a big auditorium. Chagdud Tulku was to be a special, added invited guest. Tara and I lived on very little -- food stamps, student aid, and the occasional gift from my Mom -- and our car, a very reliable Chevy Vega that we'd had for about three years, was central to our rural lifestyle. The car was doing fine, but as anyone knows, take an old car out of its comfort range and run it up and down hills at freeway speeds for a few hours, and you can burn out parts in hours that, left to their comfortable routine, might've lasted many moons. The decision was so momentous that I decided to throw the I Ching for the first time. I did it wrong, casting the lines in the wrong order, from top to bottom instead of bottom to top. But no matter. When the Mighty Ching has the answer, the inquirer's ignorance is apparently no obstacle to the transmission of oracular wisdom.

The question I posed to the Mighty Ching had been twofold: First, was there any point in going to see Gyatrul Rinpoche share the stage with Ram Dass, Joan Halifax and Chagdud Tulku? We didn't care about any of them except Gyatrul Rinpoche, and he taught us like mommy feeding her baby, day in day out, right in Ashland. Second, if it was an important event to attend, was the car up to it? The answers were clear: "The Superior Man never does anything insignificant," and "there is great power in the cart axle." So we planned a day trip, baked a chicken, bundled up the children in their child seats, and motored off the Eugene. There was, indeed, great power in the old Vega, that continued to run for another couple of years, and got us to the stadium where the big show took place. In the event, I enjoyed the show, except for the disrespect that Gyatrul Rinpoche received. Masses of hippies who had hung on Joan Halifax's every word treated Gyatrul Rinpoche's presentation of the precious Dream Yoga practices as if intermission had been declared. Relegated to the status of background noise for many, Rinpoche and Sanghe soldiered on without complaint, while the few Dharma students in the audience rescued what pearls we could, as they rolled about on the floor, kicked heedlessly by little, cloven hooves. See how I've saved the resentment down through the years?

But Gyatrul Rinpoche was far less perturbed by not getting respect from a crowd of spiritual people who lacked the intellectual discipline to listen to a rational discourse about metaphysical matters, which is what Rinpoche delivered, every time he sat down to teach. He was interested in teaching people who would listen, and thereby perhaps, hear.

Rinpoche and I were up on the temple hill after the Eugene trip, doing some brush clearing I assume, and he said to me, spontaneously, "You know, I really learned something from that Ram Dass guy." That was interesting. Ram Dass He had the audience in the palm of his hand since before he took the stage. He sat in a comfortable half lotus on a curved plastic chair with chrome legs and recounted tales and proverbs off the top of his mind. He turned everything into "grist for the mill" as the title of one of his books put it. From memories of Neem Karoli Baba to absorption in the all-consciousness by skillful application of yoga in the psychedelic state, to a near-freakout on acid at the Mall of America, he had us laughing, learning, loving, feeling how easeful it might be to be a barefoot Indian sadhu, a slave to the divine like our buddy Ram Dass. When I went up to say hi, along with the big line of people, he looked in my eyes and said, "We've been doing this a long time, haven't we?" Typical Ram Dass -- so personable, so decent, so affirming and kind. Wow. A spiritual superstar in the American mold.

So I asked Rinpoche what he'd learned from Ram Dass. "Well, you know," he said, "Sanghe and I studied for two days to deliver that teaching." He paused, and I nodded my understanding. He continued, "But that guy. His teaching was like CIA." Okay, now I was suprised, but Rinpoche explained with a little pantomime. He started leaping around, pointing behind a bush, "Maybe ..." he'd pause, then jump and say, "here!" Then he'd jump again, landing in another spot -- "Maybe here!" He did this several times with variations, "Maybe behind this tree, maybe under this rock..." Then he continued, contrasting his own teaching style with that of the Harvard professor cum holy man. "My teaching is not so smooth. My teaching is like your truck. It's big, it's noisy, it's funky, there's dust comin' in. But it's the vehicle that Guru Rinpoche used. It's the vehicle that Milarepa and Long Chenpa used. It's the only vehicle I know. So I teach it." My truck was a fifty-five Willys four wheel drive with a rigid front axle. You could drive off a small cliff with it and just bounce a little. So you get the idea. The Dharma Truck is more than Ford tough. It's a Vajra Vehicle, the real heavy metal.

Rinpoche always noted that the Vajrayana was offered to beings who are “hard to tame,” as Tibetans proudly think of themselves – a violent, illiterate tribe that was civilized and given the power of writing by the Buddhist pandits, around a thousand years ago. This explained, I presume, why he found himself teaching the highest teachings of the Ancient Ones to a group of young people who had rejected privilege and were struggling at the margins of society. We looked like wild yogis, and some of us were consciously emulating the householder yogi lifestyle that people like Ram Dass had induced us to adopt. We knew he was teaching us a spiritual path from a medieval culture with totally inaccurate ideas that included a flat earth, antiquated ideas about female biology, genetics, and the basics of conception, but we were willing to engage in controlled folly about the package in order to reach the enticing contents – genuine Dharma wisdom from a man who never planned on being a guru to 20th Century Americans who were all excited about Tibetan Buddhism and tantra for reasons all our own, and had few affinities with the basics of Tibetan life – an extreme climatic environment where the sky is literally bigger than the earth, and the sky provides a view of a universe composed of universes, densely populated with gods, demons, Buddhas, all controlled by wonder-working lamas who spent weeks in propitiatory rituals to assure good harvests and other earthly benefits. No wonder Rinpoche’s Dharma truck didn’t appeal to everyone. The warrant of genuineness, that he had in spades, wasn’t enough to overcome the fact that the doctrine he knew and could share was wrapped in concepts repellent to reason, and many people just can’t compartmentalize that dissonance, focus on the core message, and leave aside the Tibetan sales pitch that poorly persuades, and in fact repels, many 21st Century Americans.

So what was his core message? Well, I’ll tell you something he said to me that took me twenty years to figure out, so it’s pretty core. After he taught us the practice of Dzogchen view, meditation and action, he told me particularly to be careful how I practiced. “First,” he said, “set up the chair of the four thoughts that turn the mind, then relax in that chair, and practice the view. Otherwise, when you try to practice, you will fall down. You must set up that chair of the four thoughts first, then relax into the view. That is real practice.”

The four thoughts are condensable into a simple, declaratory statement: “I am extremely fortunate to be an intelligent, relatively free, literate human being living in a world where the Buddha taught and people are still practicing Dharma, because through Dharma we can cheat Death, a desirable outcome for a life that is likely going to be painful and permanently end with Death; however, only ethical people who discard selfishness and care for others as they love themselves have a chance at cheating Death, so we should practice Dharma by abandoning fictitious being and settling into genuine Being that does not grasp, and is therefore free, peaceful, and joyful.”

So Rinpoche was telling me, “First adopt the right perspective, then let actions, words and thoughts subside. That's Dzogchen.”

So how do you transition from running a little discourse like the four thoughts into letting actions, words and thoughts subside? Relaxing, he said. Relaxing in the support that those four thoughts provide you. Relaxing into a mind space where your responses to passing notions are informed with awareness that they do pass, leaving a glimpse of space. Letting go of the mental structure that is “this world and my place in it,” and allowing it to be something bigger, less tied to small choices, the small concerns of a small self. And if you are ready for the controlled folly of driving the Vajra Truck, you can even aspire to be “an immortal vidyadhara.” Yeah, I know, my folly is out of control.

[Update to follow on this post -- pictures to be inserted. Thanks for visiting and for your patience, dear Bodhisattvas.]

[Charles]

A First Year's Doubts Resolved

Rinpoche’s first visit to Ashland was pretty brief – the night after we first met him at the college, he appeared at Shandor and Gaea’s consciousness center on East Main, called “Gathering Together,” across the street from the cemetery, next door to an old church that had turned into an event space. Rinpoche gave an Amitabha empowerment at the old church the first night, but I was working my job as a bag boy at Buy Rite Market, so I couldn’t get there until after the wong was over. So I went up to Rinpoche sitting on the throne, and he put a bumpa on my head and then showed me some little images on small cards, and gave me some dutsei to drink from the bumpa, and said I got all the empowerments. But at this time, I was obsessed with the idea of doing Tara practice, and I’d heard you needed an empowerment for that, so I asked him, “So I can recite Tara mantra now?” And he laughed and said, “Yes, yes, you can recite.”

The next night, he gave a little teaching about refuge, and then the whole local contingent of spiritual hippies, including Walter von Finck and his Rainbow Star clan, Wolf (about whom you shall hear more later), Matthew Small, and a good two dozen other folks. Rinpoche gave us all Dharma names that he drew from a hat, but there were so many of us, he ran out of names when he got to me, so he had Sanghe write it down on paper for me. About ten years later, we learned about Rinpoche’s origins in the Palyul lineage, when Tara was typing up “A Garland of Wish Fulfilling Trees,” the history of the Palyul lineage, and it turned out that my namesake was a great reformer of the Palyul lineage, Kunsang Sherab, who kind of came through and kicked everybody in the ass, told them to stop boozing, whoring, chasing name and fame, and get back to practicing Dharma. So that was an interesting discovery.

But that night, sitting in the semidarkness, as vows were made, and little ceremonial tufts of hair were cut from our heads as signs of our humility, we knew nothing about the path we were entering into. Oh, we had vague notions that we’d picked up from books by Trungpa, Lama Govinda, Evans Wentz, and Alexandra David Neel, whose writings transmitted a welter of apparently conflicting esoteric information, but Rinpoche was going to teach us to drive the Dharma truck, and we could tell right away it was not engineered for western comfort. Shandor and Gaea obtained some teachings and practices for us to start doing, and advised us to read Gampopa’s “Jewel Ornament of Liberation,” a lengthy text that was early into print in English, but really hard to read for beginners, encrusted as it is with lists of numerical subdivisions, and larded with antiquated, unscientific notions about life on Earth. So I don’t think any of us read more than the first few pages. You might as well try and read law without going to law school. Just really tough going.

The sadhanas weren’t much friendlier. We were told right away, traditional style, that the entrance to this path was to recite a series of prayers and mantra recitations 100,000 times each. There’s refuge, often accompanied by “prostrations” -- throwing yourself full length on the ground, arms stretched forward before the altar 100,000 times, while reciting verses promising to gain enlightenment for the sake of all beings. That kept Tara slender for 30 years, but as Rinpoche noted, proud people never finish their prostrations. Hmmm. I never started, and Tara finished. Tells you something.

After refuge, there’s the “mandala offering,” where you pile up five heaps of colored rocks on a metal plate to symbolize the universe with its central pyramidal mountain with the gods up at the top, and down at the base, the four continents, one square, one trapezoidal, one half moon shaped, and one circular, floating in the sea, surrounded by the seven rings of iron mountains. You offer everything you will ever have in all your future lives to the Buddhas, then you dump the plate of rocks in your lap, and make another five piles while you recite the prayer again. Repeat, 100,000 times. Then there’s the purifying mantra recitation to Vajrasattva, who cleanses your bad habits and tendency to be stupid forever, a rather lengthy one-hundred syllable mantra that is actually very calming and beautiful. Then you recite the Seven Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche 100,000 times, and you perform the Guru Yoga visualization and recite his mantra 100,000 times and receive the four empowerments of body, speech, mind and the svabavakaya, and you have completed your “ngondro,” i.e., the preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism.

Well, okay, there were lots of practices to do, but that wasn’t the problem I was facing. My problem was this creeping sensation that I was being inducted into a cult run by a group of foreign men whom I didn’t know and was less and less inclined to trust, as I realized that they were apparently requiring me to believe a whole lot of stuff that made no sense. You see, I had been in a fundamentalist Christian cult when I was in my teens in Europe, the Children of God, and my parents pulled me out before before Moses David, the leader, turned the COG into a sex cult where husbands pimped their wives to rich pigs in places like Monte Carlo and Biarritz. Candidly, I didn’t learn about the sex cult transformation until year 2000, when I read Heaven’s Harlots, by a gal who suffered the horror of being pimped by her husband, and having to kidnap her kids out of the cult. But I had figured out that old Moses David had been taking advantage of post-psychedelic hippies like myself, getting our softened brains to swallow and spout nonsense about the earth being made in six days, the Great Beast of Revelationsm, the Last Judgment, and a whole lot of other scriptural nonsense. And you know, I started out a Catholic, and even as a kid, hell made no sense, and my mommy told me God wasn’t a jerk and wouldn’t punish people forever, so I put it out of my mind. And here the Tibetans were not only putting hell back in my reality, they had added a cold hell to the hot hells the Indians had invented, and frankly, I fuckin’ hate the cold, and thinking about the cold hells, where the beings suffer their entire bodies being turned into a gigantic, bleeding cold blister, was just sadistic overkill.

So while Rinpoche was away from Ashland for a year after his first visit, I was pretty steadily in turmoil about this Tibetan Buddhism thing. Spirituality was terribly important to me, because the world of men was so intimidating. Only the life of the spirit offered an alternative to wage slavery and tedium, I thought. So I had to get this thing right, and I really wasn’t sure about the Tibetans, especially because I really didn’t get on with Shandor and Gaea that well. They exuded confidence and authority about all things Tibetan, which of course was presumptuous and irritating as hell, but the truth was, they had been playing that game longer than we had, and it was natural for Rinpoche to appoint them our leaders. But we didn’t like it.

When Rinpoche returned a year later, he wasn’t doing any public events. He’d had a surgery, I believe, and had a problem in his gut that caused him a lot of pain. There was concern coming from Sanghe that he might not be here much longer. Tara, myself, Josh and newborn Maria came to visit him at a house in Talent where he was lying low, seeing only a few people. We were able to visit him, and I had been so troubled, I told Rinpoche that I had really been having doubts about the whole process. He said, “Oh yes, I can see you have this problem, and it’s good that you reveal it.” He picked up his glasses case and hid it in his robe, in an obvious fashion. Then he pulled it out and showed it, to demonstrate there was no point in hiding. Then he continued, telling us, “You are already my heart people.” Well, for us, that was like saying he remembered us from Tibet, which is probably not what he meant, but the effect was powerful. From that moment, I don’t think Tara or I ever considered studying with another teacher. We’d found him.

[Charles]

The Rainbow Star Ngondro Retreat

Tashi Choling temple sits in the foothills of Mt. Ashland on the south slope of the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, from whence the hills just keep sloping south, all the way to the banks of the Klamath River fifteen miles away, and on beyond, all the way down to the Central Valley of California, Sacramento, and San Francisco. From the veranda of the temple, you can see sixty miles to Mt. Shasta on a clear day. It is quiet, almost desolate, many times of the year. The valley has been logged three times, local history says, leaving Cottonwood Creek, that runs through the temple and once was teaming with trout all year round, a sad trickle that doesn't even reach the border town of Hilt, California about six miles south.

This is where hippies found cheap land in the seventies, and a good sized old farmhouse with a big barn with post and beam construction and half a roof. The barn was about twenty feet high, at the peak of its decaying pitched roof, had a hayloft, lots of dry storage space, and served local wildlife as a mouse hotel, cat cafeteria, and owl roost . With all of that appeal, obviously a place where kids shouldn't play. Also, it was a stained glass studio during the years when Walter von Finck, the leader of Rainbow Star commune, ruled the roost. He would spend hours there, at a big long table, methodically cutting stained glass into the same shapes, again and again, to make the lampshades that he traded to local merchants for meals, clothing, and other things his community needed. Then, the members of his commune would sit around wrapping the glass edges with copper tape, and Walter would do the final job of soldering the lampshades into shape. To run a single soldering iron, he would fire up a small generator that sat in the mud porch and hammered away generating enough voltage to heat a little tip of metal and melt the solder, a necessity that occasionally led to frivolities like watching television while Walter did the soldering.

His ex wife, Chris Caul, who birthed his daughter Mirdawna, said Walter was a bad ass drinker and fighter, one of the "Stony Mountain boys," hippie troublemakers from an era in Southern Oregon I apparently missed. By the time we met him, Walter presented as a tantric yogi who always was entitled to a nice looking consort, and in the neo-feudal era of hippiedom, a good looking guy holding title to the communal property, like Walter, was a good candidate for finding a bed partner. Those of us who thought Walter was a bit of a dictator sometimes wondered why he always found a babe to warm his bed. He was not exactly a feminist, and he had a slight Croatian accent that thickened his speech, but he had a chiseled face, good bod, long blonde hair, and talked a smooth line about the Ascended Masters and other right wing white lighters, so I guess it was all violet rays and the joyous "I Am" to the gals who liked to read metaphysical texts like a Course in Miracles, the Urantia Book, or the Akashic Bible. This was probably because Walter was pretty well-read in metaphysical topics, and had a slightly pushy way of emphasizing that you know these spiritual truths, too, so why don’t you live them confidently? As Obiwan noted, the Force acts strongly on weak minds.

Part of Walter’s shtick as a commune leader was that Rainbow Star was a retreat center, and the people who lived there were available to help other people do retreat by providing food and shelter out in the country, where people go to meditate. So it happened that the first big Ngondro teaching was held in the dead of winter, in the snow, at the Rainbow Star “Big House,” and we had a lot of visitors in our yurt for three days. People from San Francisco never met before, like Neil King, Elizabeth, and Charles Frahm, who had been studying with Rinpoche for a few years. Neil and Elizabeth were extremely intelligent, and many of RInpoche’s other students were bright sparks. We enjoyed meeting each other tremendously – like city cousins meeting country cousins – discovering the connection is a thrill.

Rinpoche taught us from Longchenpa’s ngondro, and he apologized for having to teach about the hells, admitted that westerners don’t like to hear it, so he wouldn’t go on too long about it, but you know, even ten minutes talking about imaginary terrors contrived by cynical people to control ignorant people is too long. Let me be absolutely clear here that it’s not the fact that Dharma teachers remind us about suffering I’m complaining about. It’s the invention of impossible, absurd sufferings to enslave people’s minds with fear, that I object to. And I’ve been all over that topic before, so no need to discuss it here except to say, it happened. Now I deal with it as controlled folly, but then I had to wrestle with believing or not believing, and I gotta say, that it seems like it was a big waste of energy.

In the law business that I’ve worked in for forty years, we call some arguments “makeweight.” It’s not a good thing to say about an argument, because it suggests it’s being made simply to add weight to an argument that should be sufficient in itself. Unnecessary proofs shift the focus from what we can agree about and act on collectively, to fantasies that have value only to those who embrace them and silence their internal doubts. Put simply, there’s quite enough agony on earth and in one lifetime to justify taking up the Dharma, and for people who insist on proof for their beliefs, the afterlife and reincarnation is just makeweight. Might as well not mention it, because it’s not convincing these folks to practice Dharma. In fact, by presenting yourself as a source of irrational ideas, you may discourage them entirely.

But that’s the Dharma truck that Rinpoche rolled in on. He knew it was smoky, dusty, loud and rough, but it was the only vehicle he had the keys to, and goddamn it, it was a truck, and I had no other. For three days and two nights, Sanghe translated Rinpoche’s words, and we wrote them down in our notebooks. During mealtimes, Walter and his people would come down from their place on the hill, down to the Big House, bearing pots of soup, rice, bread, and fruit. Walter was right there in the soup line, serving us all. Outside, the snow stretched away endlessly. The days were short, and the nights were long, and we stayed up late, drinking tea and talking about this amazing trip we were all on.

[Charles]

The Score

Getting a lama to teach us Dharma settled some issues for us. Tara and I had been to India in search of enlightenment, travelling overland from Istanbul, through Tehran, Kabul, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Amritsar, and Jammu, to finally end up in Varanasi, land of holy men, decaying temples, and the magical Ganga river, where we lived on a houseboat for a month, moored alongside other spiritual nomads. We’d attended a ten-day vipasyana retreat in Bodhgaya, where I conceived a dislike for the concept of mindfulness meditation that I am not sure I have entirely gotten over, but I also had a serious epiphany while dancing by myself in the temple garden to the sounds of the wild Hindu drumbeats pulsing through the town as some all-night puja wound to a climax and dueling teams of bhajan worshippers performed some serpentine conga line all around the town. There was a Dharma wheel submerged under the surface of the fountain at the center of the garden, and the still water like a disk of light made it seem as if the wheel were floating, lightly, like a compass showing the way out of samsara. I looked up in the sky and saw a representation of my mind, a turning pinwheel held together by the very spin it was in. I asked myself what would happen to the pinwheel if it stopped spinning. It stopped spinning, and the entire thing dissolved, came apart, and I was looking at space.

It’s hard to say why some people of my generation made such a big deal out of spirituality, but it probably had a lot to do with LSD. In my case, I racked up dozens of mind-bending experiences that poked holes in the fabric of ordinary reality and gave me a taste of things like the eternal now, the all-encompassing nature of mind, and the importance of finding the flow. In the end, I had way more questions than answers, and decided to take the advice of Ram Dass to become a holy person. I read Be Here Now when I was fourteen, one night in Boston on a couple of hits of purple microdot, provided by the guy who picked me up hitchhiking at Logan Airport because I had an all night layover for a flight to Maine, where I was going to a summer school up in Bath. I was not super high on the microdot, because I’d been eating a lot of Orange Sunshine, much stronger, so I just had a nice clear mind to read all of this Hindu philosophy, but I was most struck by the image of Guru Rinpoche, who looked like an esoteric master I could relate to. Ram Dass’ rap made total sense to me, because I’d been dropping in on the eternal now pretty regularly, and listening to him, I was settling right into it again. That concept of dropping the ego is so pleasant to play around with. He was very good at singing that song. Then I actually met Ram Dass, when I was sixteen and Jane, a waitress in her twenties who worked at Earthen Joy and rolled me into bed one night, saw me on the ASU campus and said to come with her. I did, and we went down in the basement of Stevenson Union, and there was Ram Dass on a low dais, with all the Yogi Bhajan people sitting up front with their turbans. Ram Dass talked about an hour, and it felt really groovy, and then he said it was time for some people to leave, and I knew that meant me, but Jane stayed, and I think they sang some bhajans, and I floated off into the night.

So we went to India and we became Buddhists, and that meant we read the few Buddhist books you could find, by Chogyam Trungpa and Tarthang Tulku, and tried to meditate the best we could. But the message in all those Buddhist books is, “You need a guru.” So one day I was working at Buy Rite and I went to eat lunch at a little cheap lunch joint that used to be where Mihama’s was, across the street from the SOU administration building, Churchill Hall, on Siskiyou Boulevard. I had just finished reading Tarthang Tulku’s “Gesture of Balance,” so I wrote him a letter asking him to be my Dharma teacher. Tara and I had met him two years before, in Mesa, at a lecture put on by Larry Simmons, one of his students who worked with troubled youth, and ran Prehab, a discipline academy, where my brother in law Layne spent some time after one too many drug fueled adventures. Life weaves some funny patterns. At any rate, I wrote this letter and folded it up and put it in my pocket and got up and on the way out, I saw the flyer Shandor and Gaea had put up announcing Gyatrul Rinpoche’s first visit to town. So I never sent the letter, and Gyatrul became my Rinpoche.

He was also a lot of other peoples’ Rinpoche, too, though, so competing for his attention was something that was always part of the scene, and one way to get Rinpoche’s attention was to talk about buying land. Of course, all of us hippies wanted land, but we had very little in the way of money. Rinpoche didn’t have any money, either. But Shandor was into that prosperity consciousness stuff. Once, he even tried to sell these chain letters he’d “bought” in San Francisco in Ashland. The chain letter was called “The Circle of Gold,” and you could buy one from the most recent fool, add your name to the list, sell it to the next fool, and send some money to another person on the list, and this stupid letter was signed by, among other spiritual types, Ram Dass! Well, spiritual or not, the Circle of Gold did not take off in Ashland, and I think Shandor took a loss on that venture, but better for his karma, right?

Shandor would then inflict this prosperity consciousness nonsense on the whole sangha. He’d found the perfect land for Rinpoche! And it would only cost $300,000. Call it a million in today’s dollars. But no problem. All we had to do was will to make the money appear, and it would! For months, we were besieged with the frenzied drumbeat of “Find the cash!” It was of course futile. If we’d known how to make money, we’d have already done it. As I mentioned, we weren’t even dealing dope. We didn’t cut stained glass. We held what jobs we could get and collected food stamps. Okay, this is where you realize Shandor grew up in an affluent New Jersey home, and probably still gets checks from back east, while you are dirt-poor Arizona refugees lucky to have a roof over your head this month.

Indeed, the time came when Tara and I no longer had a home in Ashland. We’d rented a nice house on 75 Bush Street from our friend Jan, who owned it thanks to her parents’ largesse, and had lived there with Robert Levreault and their son Kian. Robert was one of the original four Rainbow Star communards, along with Walter, his wife Chris, and Lee Marks, who built the pyramid house of which we will have occasion to speak. Robert was always rather a shifty guy, and although Jan was quite attractive and Kian very cute, he left them to be a traveling musician. Jan decided to recover from the jilting by going traveling with a young lover with a goatee who read French poetry. In a typical hippie double cross, after we’d lived there a few months, Jan was ready to move back in with Frenchy and her little boy Kian, and we needed to find a new place to live.

So of course we decided on a very practical alternative. We would rent what had been Rainbow Star land in Colestine from Chris Caul, who still owned an undivided one fourth of the total property, and build a yurt out in a bare meadow, where no road lead, and there was no water or electricity to be had. After all, we only had two children to take care of, and while we built the yurt, we could live in a tent. Truth was, we just didn’t have a lot of alternatives, and taking the tough route was getting to be a routine. We found Chris at a house on Helman street with holes in the wall. She was livin’ the rougher side of life. We offered her fifty bucks a month for the right to build a yurt out on her property, which couldn’t be all that pleasing to Walter, but she didn’t care, and fifty bucks was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, so the deal was done.

Tara bought Len Charney’s book, “Build a Yurt,” and took a carpentry class from our friend Glenn, and we ordered a huge stack of two-by-two lumber to build the yurt frame, that was delivered to 75 Bush street, where we cut the lumber into requisite lengths, drilled the bolt holes, and hauled them out to Rainbow Star on the roof of the Vega. I cut my work week to four days a week, and Tara juggled taking care of Josh and Maria, buying lumber and building materials, and laboring out on the land. She’d pick me up at Buy Rite when I got off work, the Vega stacked high with lumber, riding low above the pavement, kids in the child seats in back. Then we’d drive out to the Colestine, make supper, and bed down in a big orange tent. After a month our friend James sold us a camp trailer with a nice kitchen. It had a bed in it, but we all slept in the tent. One night I got out of the tent to pee and I was blinded by light. I looked up at the sky to see what was so bright. It was the Milky Way. You sacrifice some, you gain some.

Matthew and his friend Shantena, the Rajneesh follower who was also an Italian nuclear physicist, helped us build the foundation for the yurt. We had no long beams – our lumber supplier was Newt Likely, who ran his own self-loading log truck and Ford-engine powered sawmill, producing beautiful rough-cut lumber, but he didn’t have any twenty footers. So we went out and cut poles, peeled off the bark with Matthew’s skiving tool, and created the necessary hexagonal foundation. I tell you, if you have never tried to level a six-sided structure on a hill, you oughta try it. Well, we did get it done. Then on went the floor, and we were ready to assemble the yurt wall. The wall is like a folding accordion gate about 60 feet long that you loop into a circle and secure with a large loop of aircraft cable that holds the whole thing together. The roof beams also rest on that circle of cable, so the structure is held up by a “tension ring.” Very elegant and dynamic.
When the day came to put up the wall, we have a pot luck, and all the hippies in Colestine came to help us. It was a big turnout. I remember Pete Cislo and his wife Barbara were there. Grant and Nancy, the goat farmers from Talent, were there. Of course Matthew and Shantena were there. We got the wall up, and pushed a few long two by twos through the openings in the wall to keep it wedged up and all went down to eat pot luck by the trailer. We were all chowin’ down, talking and laughing, when suddenly there was a huge “BOOM” and we looked up at the yurt foundation, and the wall had broken the long two by twos and fallen back on the deck with a crashing noise. Fortunately, no harm done. We stood it back up and resumed the party.

Putting the roof on was harder. We got it out of round, and ended up working on an ellipse by car lights, trying to push the long roof beams into place, as each one got tighter and harder and we realized we had to take it all apart and redo it the next morning. I still remember Grant trying to push one more roofbeam into place, while Nancy and Tara sat watching with the kids, looking worried. Grant was not a guy to give up easily, nor I, but finally we did. The next morning we took it down, and did it over again, right.

Those were the days, truly. We were all poor, but we cared for each other. We shared things. Our wives shared their breasts with each other’s children, so they were really moms to everyone. We stopped what we were doing to help each other. We shared living spaces, cars, food, child care, conversation -- the pleasure of each other’s company. Not bad at all.

Covering the conical roof shape with asphalt roofing was troubling me. I couldn’t figure a good shape to cut the sheets to cover it and keep out the rain. Then one day, a roofer came out to visit. He was a Sai Baba devotee, a real sweet man who’d lost his son to a drug overdose and turned to the spiritual path. We’d met him at a bhajan session at the Sunshine Sprouts people’s house that Walter took us to, and when I told him my problem, he said he’d come out and see. One morning, he drove up in his truck. Big man, handsome and strong, wearing a cowboy hat. He took one look at my setup and said, “Just take a twenty foot strip and cut it diagonal, and cover the roof with those triangles, pointy side toward the skylight.” That was all it took to get the roof done. Just like that, every little thing on that kooky structure had to be custom made. The plexiglass windows. The trapezoidal door. The fire protection for the wood stove was minimal. We could only afford one piece of insulated pipe to fit through the wall – not recommended!

But it was great. Once we were set up, life was so much better, because it was cheap, and the only thing we had to worry about was Todd Miller, Jackson County Code enforcement. The great thing about living in isolation in the country with really low rent is, when you’re totally broke, you can just sit there in your house and do nothing, and it costs nothing. Which in itself is an opening into a spiritual perspective. Poverty as our greatest resource.

We didn’t know, of course, that we had built our yurt on the future site of Tashi Choling. At first Walter was annoyed, and kind of ignored our presence, but after a few months, he opened up. Coffee was the vehicle. One morning I saw Walter walking up to the yurt carrying something. I went out and met him and he asked if I was drinking coffee. Actually, I had started to, like a lot of other Ashland folks, since these two guys who had been car mechanics started selling bulk coffee to the Ashland food coop. So Walter and I started having coffee together, and pretty soon we were better friends than before. He loved to chide me for putting the yurt in the middle of the meadow. Playing prophet, he would say, “Don’t you know what is going to be here?” Pointing at the outhouse, he’d say. “Do you realize where you put your shitter?”

So we had our place on the land, of which we were justly proud. Many Ashland hippies aspired to live in the kind of pleasant poverty we were enjoying out at Rainbow Star, and we had managed it on our own terms. We didn’t become part of Walter’s group. We did our own thing, he became our friend, and it worked out. Tara went back to college, using her dad’s veteran benefits. I quit my job at Buy Rite, and went back to college, got student aid, a job writing for the faculty newsletter, and a newfound self respect. Having a guru was doing us good.

Rinpoche still hadn’t found his land, though. For all of Shandor’s effort, his vision was always very expansive. He argued that it would be insulting to offer Rinpoche anything less than a big spread -- like Tarthang’s Odiyan. But Rinpoche, who lived in Tarthang’s Pema Ling in the Bay Area for a time, wasn’t competitive. He always said that it didn’t have to be big, it just had to have the right qualities that a meditator needs. He gave lectures about what types of retreat land were appropriate for different practices engaging the four karmas – peace, expanse, power and wrath – and what types of land were inimical to spiritual practice – steep ravines give rise to desire spirits, and places that look lovely and attractive can give rise to obstacles over time. Still, the actual land had not manifested.

One day, Tara took it into her head to tell Rinpoche to come and look at our land. Now, everything was wrong with this plan. First, Rainbow Star was still an undivided parcel of around sixty acres, owned by four people who really didn’t get along well anymore. Chris and Walter divorced. Robert Levreault was in the wind, the wandering troubadour. Lee Marks was a hairdresser in Sausalito, and had never shown the slightest interest in selling the pyramid house, that he built for his beloved Heather, whom he discovered did not want to live in a pyramid house in Colestine Valley. If Rinpoche bought an undivided fourth share in Rainbow Star, it would lead to zoning problems down the way, and partitioning off just a fourth would also be difficult because of land use restrictions. Nevertheless, Tara thought of none of this, and neither did Rinpoche. Thus ensued the visit to the land I related previously, where Rinpoche decided that he really liked the land, and he wanted to buy it. He said that this land had features that made it good for every type of practice – peaceful, expansive, powerful and wrathful. He brought Chakdud Tulku down from Cottage Grove to check it out, and his yogometer went off the charts. They both loved the view of Pilot Rock, the bald granite sentinel to the east, and the large stand of trees on a hill to the south, owned by Vince Majoris, that Ani Rioh ultimately bought. Shandor was very distressed by Rinpoche’s infatuation with the land in Colestine. I seem to remember him sitting in a field next to Rinpoche, belaboring his point, until at least Sanghe told him to leave off with it, that Rinpoche had made up his mind. Shandor might have had some insight into the legal problems with the deal, and certainly could see it foreshadowed Charles and Tara living on the temple land, a thought sure to bring a shudder to the sober-minded. Be that as it may, arm wrestling with Rinpoche could only result in a broken arm, and Shandor gave up quickly. The die had been cast, and our number was up.

It was time to find Chris Caul again. I found her camp up above Lithia Park. Cold ashes, dirty dishes, half-empty BBQ sauce bottle, beer cans. Richard Schwindt found her walking down the street in Ashland, and in short order had cooked up a deal. Twenty thousand for Chris’ one-fourth interest, with some kind of downpayment, and monthly payments of three hundred dollars. Tara and I upped our rent payment to $100 per month to pay one third of that, and the deal was done. Rinpoche had scored the land that would become Tashi Choling. Eventually, Shandor would buy Walter’s fourth share, and Rinpoche’s Chinese donors would buy out Robert and Lee Marks, and all of Rainbow Star would become Tashi Choling.