American Buddha Bulletin Board

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.]