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Prologue
A
stupa is a holy thing, a monument to peace and harmony. It is a place
where the Buddha's mind is alive on earth. That's what I was told, anyway,
when I first came to Poolesville, Maryland, and what I still believe-in
spite of everything else I know.
The
moon was rising in the dark blue sky. It was a harvest moon, a warm moon,
full and golden. It was the fall of 1996. The next morning a retreat would
begin, a bodhicitta or compassion retreat. I arrived on the temple
grounds very late, parked my car, and walked past the main building of
the temple, a large white plantation-style mansion. The temple looked
quiet behind its spread of green grass. Only a few dim lights were still
on. Through a window I saw a flash of a burgundy robe inside the Dharma
room-a monk or nun was cleaning the altar bowls. I wasn't going inside.
Instead, I walked down the long driveway in the direction of the dark
woods. I went to the Migyur Dorje stupa when I was confused, when my mind
needed clearing, simplicity, a broad brushstroke, a big PICTURE. When
I needed to relax.
I'd
been told that if you walk around a stupa, clockwise, you will receive
blessings. I still believe that, too. There are all kinds of explanations
of what a stupa is, of course, and how one works. There are academic tracts
with detailed diagrams, discussions of the various types of stupas, and
essays about the metaphysical properties of these compelling shrines.
You can be as highbrow as you want about stupas-just as Buddhism itself
can be terribly highbrow-or you can try to comprehend a stupa simply and
forget the details. You can walk around one, clockwise, as the Tibetans
do, and just soak up the blessings. I had purchased miniature stupas from
the temple gift shop in Poolesville. I collected photographs of stupas
and books about them. I became fascinated with the inner chambers of the
stupas, and the secret contents. Sometimes my passion was a little hard
to explain to my journalist friends. To the unromantic eye, I suppose,
a stupa doesn't look like much. The Buddha's mind is just a monolith,
really-an obelisk with a pagoda roof and a spire. At the highest point,
there was a crystal ball pointing to the sky.
I
took the shortcut in the woods and found the narrow dirt road that led
to the great stupa. When I had started coming to Poolesville regularly,
just a year before, there had been plans to pave the stupa road-but it
was still potholed and loaded with hazardous puddles and large rocks.
Vines were curling out of the forest, too, dangling down from trees and
growing back into the path.
A
stupa is a magical thing, seductive and mysterious, but also very simple.
Maybe that's what I like about them. There is no debate waging about stupas-no
controversies swirling within the rarified world of Tibetan Buddhism about
what a stupa really is. A stupa is perfection. A stupa is emptiness, and
a stupa can't break your heart.
A
tulku is a little harder to comprehend. Like a stupa, a tulku is
also a living Buddha and supposed to be perfect. That's what I was told,
at any rate, when I first arrived in Poolesville. But a tulku is a human
being-a person with a childhood, with parents, with loves and losses,
with regrets, with needs and dreams. Which brings me to Jetsunma. She
is a tulku. And she is the one who lured me to Poolesville and to this
place called Kunzang Odsal Palyul Changchub Choling, or Fully Awakened
Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light. For a year I had been coming
to Poolesville as a journalist, and this mysterious woman called Jetsunma-an
American woman and a Tibetan Buddhist lama-was my subject.
I
had met Jetsunma in 1993, when I came to interview her for a profile in
Elle magazine. She was in her mid-forties at the time and wore her dark
hair long and curly. I couldn't help but notice her eye makeup, and the
red polish on her nails. She was earthy, worldly, a shade tacky. She cracked
jokes and seemed to tell the truth, even if it was unflattering-confessing
to me at one point that she'd bought her long, flowery-print skirt on
sale at The Limited. I was charmed by her wisdom and good humor. She seemed
without pretensions or pious sanctimony. To me, there was some thing very
special about her. And, clearly, I wasn't the only one. A tulku is thought
to be a reincarnated saint, an enlightened lama who is able to choose
the circumstances of his or her rebirth-and return to earth or our human
realm, as the Buddhists call it, specifically to help end suffering. Within
the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, she held a revered position, particularly
for a Western woman. Her long Tibetan name, Jetsunnia Ahkon Norbu Lhamo,
carries the honorific Jetsunma-one of the religion's most regal titles.
And the Tibetan Buddhist center she had founded in 1986 had quickly become
one of the most prominent in the United States. It was crowded with families
and lay practitioners-nearly all Westerners-who had come to study Tibetan
Buddhism with Jetsunma. She was also running the largest monastery of
Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in America.
When
I ventured there in 1993 to meet Jetsunma, I knew next to nothing about
Tibetan Buddhism, apart from what I'd picked up in mainstream media and
what I'd witnessed during a childhood spent in California, where the practice
of various kinds of Buddhism seems more prevalent, I was naive, I suppose,
and pulled toward Jetsunma by something in me not entirely rational. She
seemed to have created an enchanted world and a radical place beyond the
laws of physics and government. And at the same time it seemed happy in
a way that the newsroom world where I had spent the last ten years--did
not. Bitterness is rampant in journalism, as is a vague malaise: My desk
at the newspaper was surrounded on all sides by the desks of people taking
antidepressants. Was there something special about Tibetan Buddhism that
made people content, or was it simply the lush temple grounds? At KPC-as
it is called by the students-there are seventy-two acres of woods and
gardens to walk in, hidden shrines to peek at, prayer wheels to spin,
and benches to rest your legs. Everywhere, it seemed, pale-colored prayer
flags were blowing softly in the breeze. Outside the main building there
were shoes scattered about. Inside there was a funky gift shop selling
Buddhist books, crystals, and postcards of His Holiness, the Fourteenth
Dalai Lama of Tibet (does he ever not smile?). There was a buzz in the
air, a freshness and vitality. The nuns and monks, dressed in long burgundy
and saffron robes, were for the most part Americans, and they went about
their duties with a playfulness and wit that surprised me. The rooms were
crowded with colorful Buddhist icons and artifacts and ritual instruments,
but at the same time they had a feeling of warmth and familiarity, a feeling
of home.
And
there were a number of exquisite spire-topped stupas to circumambulate
in Poolesville, too-all conceived by Jetsunma and executed by her students-but
nothing compared in beauty and magnitude with the great Migyur Dorje stupa.
Early in the summer of 1995, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche had visited Poolesville
from India and had given Jetsunma a rare collection of ancient relics,
perhaps the rarest and most potent combination of Tibetan Buddhist relics
in the West. And Jetsunma had set out to build a stupa worthy of them.
This book begins with the construction of this stupa, during the late
summer of 1995. It tells the story of Jetsunma and how her monastery came
to exist. It tells the stories of Alana Elgin, Sherab Khandro, and Dechen
Grissom-three women who met up with Jetsunma and vowed to devote their
lives to her and the Dharma, of the teachings of the Buddha. It also describes
my own turbulent first year in Poolesville, which began in the fall of
1995 and which ended in September 1996 at the time of the compassion retreat.
When
I arrived in the clearing in the woods where the stupa stood, the moonlight
was streaming down on the magnificent monument like liquid from the sky.
I could see the roughness of the concrete-it still hadn't been sanded
or painted. And the impressive landscaping plans, for an amphitheater
and waterfall, for shrubs and well-placed spotlights, were still on hold.
The money had run out-or had been spent on other things.
But
even so, in the darkness and surrounded by the woods, the stupa had an
unworldly loveliness. Neglect didn't mask its power but almost emphasized
it. In a way it seemed as natural and alive as the forest. I liked the
way the concrete was stained and imperfect. And in the bright moonlight
I could see the crystal ball glowing quietly at the top. Standing on the
ground and looking up at the stupa's base, I was moved-the stupa moved
me like no historical monument in Washington ever had.
I
had seen this stupa come from nothing. I'd seen the place in the woods
before the trees were cleared. I'd seen a deep hole dug in the summer
heat. I'd seen an eclectic young crew of six Americans work tirelessly,
selflessly-with the sort of energy and devotion and faith that gave me
a kind of hope myself. There had been aching elbows and knees and shoulders,
There had been accidents and sleepless nights. They had bent rebar and
made molds. They had poured buckets and buckets of concrete. And as the
stupa had come to life, inch by inch, and grown taller and taller, I had
seen bags and bags of rice and beans passed person by person and then
lowered into its belly. I had seen a long cedar tree lying on its side
in the prayer room-its branches shorn, its body smooth-and seen it painted
red with gold Tibetan lettering. The relics were placed in little clear
plastic boxes and carefully tied to the painted tree with silk string.
One box contained an ancient fingerbone of Migyur Dorje; another housed
a "brain pill" of a great wisdom being. And one small clear box was said
to hold the crystallized breath of the Buddha himself.
In
the darkness and moonlight, as I began to walk around the stupa, clockwise,
a thought came into my mind. It was as though the stupa itself had whispered
it to me. There are sacred things. There are sacred towers and
sacred texts and sacred teachings and sacred traditions. And the truth
is, absolutely everything sacred has some people behind it.
Excerpted
from The Buddha from Brooklyn by Martha Sherrill. Copyright© 2000
by Martha Sherrill. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division
of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may
be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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