Chapter 55 - Epilogue

GURU AND CHELA AND THE JOURNEY INTO THE LIGHT

Since it was Tomo Géshé Rimpoché who opened to me the gates of Tibet, it is only fitting that I close this story of my Tibetan pilgrimage with a few words about his new incarnation, the present Tulku, Jigmé Nagawang Kalzang Rimpoché.

After our brief encounter at Gyantse at the end of 1947, we had not been able to catch up with him, and by the time we reached India he was again on his way to Sera, where conditions were regarded as safe enough for him to continue his studies. He remained there until 1959, when he passed his final examination as Géshé and was thus confirmed in his former title.

Hardly had he left Sera to take up his residence at Lhasa when the people rose against their Chinese oppressors and saved the Dalai Lama from becoming a prisoner or a tool of the Communists, who had tried to pose as the liberators of the poor -- a lie that was once and for ever exploded, when it was exactly the poor who, in spite of all inducements offered to them during the first years of Chinese occupation, revolted against their self-styled liberators.

During these terrible events innumerable people came to Tomo Géshé Rimpoché who had been all the time in close collaboration with the Dalai Lama's supporters, seeking solace and encouragement. As in his former life, he lavishly distributed his life-giving

'ribus' to all who asked for his help and his blessings. Many of the Khampas, who had heard of Tomo Géshé's fame and the miraculous powers ascribed to his 'ribus' threw themselves fearlessly into the struggle for the liberation of the Dalai Lama and their beloved country.

The Chinese soon began to fear Tomo Géshé's ribus as much as the bullets of the Khampas. They arrested him and threw him into prison, where they tried to break his spirit by exposing him to the most inhuman conditions and humiliations, forced labour for sixteen hours a day on a starvation diet, demanding of him the lowest and dirtiest services and alternating this with the strictest solitary confinement without air and light.

Not long afterwards, people who had fled from Tibet reported that Tomo Géshé had been kulled by the Chinese, who -- as we were told -- had poured boiling coal-tar over him. while he was sitting in meditation. According to their story, he had died without a word of complaint or a sign of fear.

We were deeply distressed, and the idea that our Guru should have chosen to return in a human body, only to die a martyr's death, before even having a chance to fulfil the mission for which he had come back, seemed to us a particularly cruel and senseless fate.

How great, therefore, was our joy when in 1961 we read a report that under diplomatic pressure from the Government of India and the personal interference of the Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, the Chinese had released the Rimpoché and that he had arrived in Gangtok on the 24th of June 1961 after more than two years of imprisonment. The reason for his escape from imprisonment and death was that, being born in Gangtok (Sikkim), India could claim him as an Indian-protected person. Now we could see the deeper reason why Tomo Géshé, in spite of his wish to return to Dungkar Gompa, was not reborn in the Tomo Valley (as people might have expected), but just a short distance beyond the frontier of Tibet!

As I was not yet able to undertake the long journey from my present abode in the Western Himalayas to Yi-Gah Chö-Ling or Kalimpong, where Tomo Geshe lives alternately in his two main monasteries, I requested the Ven. Sangharakshita Thera, Head of the Triyāna Vardhana Vihāra, KaJimpong, to ask the Rimpoché whether he remembered me, his old disciple, and whether he had recognised me at Gyantse. His answer was plain and simple: 'I know him!'

We shall meet again, as soon as conditions will make it possible. By now I have reached the age of my old Guru, while he is now even younger than I was when I met him in his previous life. But old or young, the inner relationship between Guru and Chela remains, though the roles may be reversed outwardly. We shall meet again and again, till we both have fulfilled our tasks -- till we both have become one with that ultimate light that is both our origin and our aim, and that unites us through many births and deaths and beyond.

It is this light that guided me through life, and now that I look back upon this life's long road, I can see it winding through a wide and variegated landscape, dominated by a mighty stream, the stream of spiritual tradition, that has been flowing from beginningless time and through the millenniums of human lives and endeavour. It embodies the experiences of untold generations of devotees, seers and singers, thinkers and poets, artists and scholars, sinners and saints. The sources of this stream are the Enlightened Ones, who ever and again manifest themselves among human beings, like Śākyamuni Buddha, whose message was of such universal significance that even after two and a half millenniums we have not yet exhausted the depth of its meaning and its manifold ways of expression and realisation.

The particular aspect under which this stream appeared in my life was that of Buddhism. Though, I was fortunate enough to have had, even in early youth, the opportunity of informing myself of the main tenets of all great religions, without being influenced or compelled in any one or other direction, I chose Buddhism, because it was the very expression of my innermost nature and not something forced upon me by circumstances. I certainly was a Buddhist long before I was born!

However, it is always instructive to see how, at different times, different aspects of the same thing appeal to us. While in youth the rational side of Buddhism and the historical figure of die Buddha stood in the foreground of my religious conviction, the experiences of later years showed me the shallowness of intellectual reasoning and convinced me of the irrational (though not anti-rational) quality of Reality and of the spiritual character of the Buddha, by which the historical impulse of the past is transformed into a living force of the present, into a living reality within ourselves.

In applying the simile of the stream to the development and flow of Buddhist tradition through the last 2,500 years since the Parinirvāṇa of Buddha Śākyamuni, a vision flashed through my mind of the journey along this mighty river and of the infinite variety of vistas which it revealed to me. I will try to describe some of them, though I am conscious of the very personal nature of such a vision and of the inadequacy of words and symbols to depict it.

In the beginning the landscape was dominated by the mighty mountains of the Four Noble Truths: the Truth of Suffering, the Truth of its Causes, the Truth of Liberation, and the Truth of the Path of Liberation. The first of these mountains looked dark and sinister and was covered with ashes and black volcanic rock, bare of all vegetation, while an ominous indigo-coloured cloud hovered over it like a pall of doom.

The second mountain belched forth fire and smoke, and streams of incandescent lava licked the sides of the summit with red glowing tongues, while a rain of stone and fire crushed and extinguished all life around the raging mountain. And a thunderous voice filled the air: 'Verily, I tell you, the world is on fire. It burns with the fire of greed, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion!'.

The third mountain was bathed in brilliant sunshine and its peak gleamed with eternal snow in the deep blue sky-unearthly, pure, far beyond the reach of mortals.

But a fourth mountain loomed beside it. rising in eight lofty steps; and from the last and highest of them a multi-coloured radiance issued and threw a rainbow bridge towards the white, gleaming peak of the third mountain that towered above all the others.

And again the Buddha's voice filled the air: The path of deliverance is found, the Eightfold Path that leads through Right Understanding, Right Aspirations, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Awareness and Right Meditation to the final liberation of Nirvana.

There were lovely groves at the foot of the Mountain of Liberation, and many who wanted to prepare themselves for the steep ascent retired into their peace and protection from the heat of the fierce sun, and devoted themselves to a life of renunciation and contemplation. And they built walls around themselves to keep out the world and its disturbing influences. But the more they shut out the world, the less they were aware of those mighty mountains, and the sound of the great river became fainter and fainter.

Finally, the walls became so high that even the Mountain of Liberation was lost to sight. But the recluses preserved the memory of the four mountains and of the Eightfold Path, leading to the summit of the Mountain of Liberation; and they wrote many a learned tome on the dangers and wonders of those mountains. And though the world, which they had shut out, still fed them and clothed them, they felt that they had become independent of it; and thus there was no more necessity to leave their sheltered grove and to set out for a strenuous climb, which only few had attempted and even fewer accomplished. And those few had never returned.

But the river flowed on as ever.

Thus many a year passed by in this cool and pleasant grove, until one day the call of the river reached some of the recluses, whose yearning for liberation had not yet been lulled to sleep. And at the same time they also heard the call of the world, the voices of innumerable suffering beings inhabiting the river valley, and like them yearning to be free. In order to save them all, they built a big ship and set out on the great adventure of the river. But the farther they travelled, the more they realised that the river in some mysterious way carried them towards the very aim they had been striving for from the outset and that however many pilgrims joined the vessel, there was room enough for all. The vessel seemed to grow with the number of the pilgrims. Thus all the world was welcome to it.

And now they also began to realise that the Eightfold Path leads right through the world and that its first step is the recognition that there is nothing that separates us from our fellow-pilgrims, unless it be the illusion of our own uniqueness or superiority. A wave of warm love broke from their hearts and enveloped their fellow-pilgrims and all that lives, until they felt wide and open and free as the sky.

Their spiritual path and the river had become one and flowed towards the setting sun, into which it seemed to merge. And the radiance of the waters of Life mingled with the radiance of the Sun of Enlightenment; and it seemed as if the lonely mountain of individual liberation received its glory only from the reflected light that emanated from the river and the setting sun into which it flowed.

And the radiance of the setting sun was filled with innumerable Buddhas and Bodhisattvas: all those who had gpne before and all those who were still to come -- because it is the realm where time is extinguished and past and future are one with the eternal present. Therefore the setting sun, towards which the river flows, will never set, and its radiance will never be extinguished for those who travel along the river.

And so I will close this book with an invocation:

TO THE BUDDHA OF INFINITE LIGHT

Who is meditated upon while facing the setting sun, when the days work is accomplished and the mind is at peace:

AMITĀBHA!

Thou who liveth within my heart,
Awaken me to the immensity of thy spirit,
To the experience of thy living presence!
Deliver me from the bonds of desire,
From the slavery of small aims,
From the delusion of narrow egohood!
Enlighten me with the light of thy wisdom,
Suffuse me with the incandescence of thy love.
Which includes and embraces the darkness,
Like the light that surrounds the dark core of the flame,
Like the love of a mother that surrounds
The growing life in the darkness of her womb,
Like the earth protecting the tender germ of the seed.
Let me be the seed of thy living light!
Give me the strength to burst the sheath of selfhood,
And like the seed that dies in order to be reborn.
Let me fearlessly go through the portals of death,
So that I may awaken to the greater life:
The all-embracing life of thy love,
The all-embracing love of thy wisdom.

Kasar Devi Ashram, Kumaon Himalaya, India, November 1964