The last hurrah

By Adele Hulse

I’ve been to seven funerals recently.

Three church: massive flowers, singing, good clothes, polished box, powerful words spoken “in sure and certain faith”; tears, hugs and kisses.

Two Jewish: no flowers, ordinary clothes, timeless Hebrew prayers, raw pine box with rope handles, unapologetic heap of fresh dirt spiked with long shovels, the hollow echo of the first clods; tears, hugs and kisses.

One parlor: massive flowers, five-star foyer and toilets, good clothes, no singing, polished box, democratic program orchestrated by sensitive celebrant and could you hurry please, the next one is due; tears, hugs and kisses.

One Chinese: Necropolis chapel, black clothes and armband with tiny red cotton triangle, big bunch of red roses and candles before black-draped portrait of the deceased. Speeches in Chinese. Very secular. Lots of slow, deep bows. Service ended with everyone invited to walk around the open coffin to say goodbye; tears, hugs and kisses.

There she was, a soft black cotton wimple over her head, a white sheet to her chin, Mrs. Cui Yu Hu, who has died at 107. Madam Hu made national news when the Australian government threatened to deport her, at 104. When they capitulated, this tiny woman gave the whole country a lesson in compassion, respect and morality. Apparently, Madam Hu enjoyed her last meal, said goodbye, smiled at everyone and died. Just like that. Not one of the loving crowd attending was related to her. She adopted her only child, who is Japanese, as an orphan after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. “Madam Hu lived her whole life in kindness,” said one speaker, in English. You could see it in her sweet face.

High time I made my own arrangements. I have long been appalled by just about every aspect of the self-invented modern funeral industry, so my first step was to meet with Professor Anthony Goodwin, Head of Anatomy at Melbourne University. The sky-burial I favor is not going to happen, unless accidentally, but please, hold the polished box, pointless flowers and ridiculous bill.

My understanding is that, generally, clinical death is not simultaneous with what Buddhists call “the mind leaving the body”. One of the signs of true death is said to be no core heat at the heart. On making expert enquiries I learned this takes between twelve and twenty-four hours, depending on climate and body mass. (The bodies of advanced practitioners have stayed warm and fresh three weeks after clinical death – but I am hardly in that class.) Ideally, the body would not be moved or touched during this period – hard to control in a hospital, unless you had it set up with an advocate. This waiting time makes organ donation impossible, but Professor Goodwin said it would be fine with him. Just keep the room cool and fresh.

When it’s time, my next of kin calls the university’s funeral director. So far so good. I’ve got what I wanted. If what’s left is of use to advancing medical science, that’s a bonus. If the circumstances of my death make all of the above impossible, my useless body will just take what it gets.

So I signed the form. It was easy. No polished box, flowers, gangsta cars or bill for me – just gloved fingers, scalpels, saws, and tags on the bits that get cut off.

It was the bits that got me going – when my son (a myotherapy student) started talking about knees he had seen in “wet lab”. Immediately I wanted to be a knee! How wonderful that my body could be sliced and diced to teach our doctors and scientists of the future how to relieve others from pain. I emailed the kid’s godmother who replied that she, too, wanted to become a knee. “Just think, darling! We could be knee-to-knee in cold storage!” We were so pleased.

If that makes you squeamish, what exactly do you think happens to bodies two meters underground, noting that the first load of earth machine-dumped into the hole is usually enough to break the flimsy box? We have forgotten what we are, our chthonic resonance warped by a steady diet of death as entertainment and the fictions of the beauty industry.

In Australia donors are 50/50 male/female, mostly over fifty years old and from a very mixed socio-economic range – going by the addresses. They don’t ask many questions – a lot of information is suddenly obsolete. Most get treated with formalin and are used as dissection cadavers, either whole or in sections for medical, dental, physiotherapy, myotherapy and science students. The use-by date is around three years, after which they are cremated. Some bodies get used fresh, in advanced surgical training such as hip replacements. These are cremated within a couple of weeks.

Body sections are tagged, entered into a data base and eventually, cremated together. Rarely, one part may become a museum exhibit. Next-of-kin can arrange to receive the ashes, otherwise they are scattered in a Memorial Park.

My body will be of no use if I die of a contagious disease, undergo an autopsy, have had recent surgery, receive gross injury or die further than 60 km from the center of this city. Moreover, one cannot be both an organ donor and a body donor. It just doesn’t work. What the students need to see is normal anatomy.

Become a Friend of FPMT

return to top ^

May-June 1997

By Adèle Hulse

Last issue I told you about the Vajrayogini retreat I faked. Well, I never did the fire puja for that because even though I felt very happy afterwards I didn’t feel I had understood the process and was damned if I was going to confound my limitations by adding some other ritual I understood even less. This is my Dharma practice and I am the best judge of how it affects me. I am not interested in ticking off a list of commitments for frequent flier points.

We had that at boarding school – getting sore knees in the icy chapel, blisters bursting on our fingers and toes as we babbled off “indulgences” – little prayers with credit points that guaranteed a certain number of days less in “purgatory.” “Oh Lord, keep the fires away,” kind of thing. It was pure superstition, on my part at least.

So I thought I’d start again. Vajrayogini is a terrific little retreat; both of mine took 26 days doing only two sessions a day and there is only one mantra. There I was again sitting up in bed with my legs out in front (if Maitreya can do it so can I) trying to focus on that funny little red bam in the heart and pretending I was sending bliss to all sentient beings. But again I felt I was just wasting my time.

“All sentient beings” is the Mahayana touchstone but being so wide and all encompassing, for me it leaves too much undone up close. How can I send bliss to “all sentient beings” when half the people I meet every day irritate the hell out of me? So I had a brain wave: I got out that list of 20 “enemies” I wrote about in a previous column.

It is so scary looking at that list, rubbing my nose in my confession. But there is real energy there, real regret, not just this amorphous “all sentient beings” thing. So I propped up the list and said rounds of mantra focusing on one name at a time.

The tantric deal is of course that while you are pretending to be a deity you can hardly have room to dislike someone. That sort of stuff is a bit beneath deities.

So holding my pathetic attention on the red bam and the name, I send bliss light to that particular person, wishing them to be free from all delusion, releasing that person from all suffering – especially from my unkind view of them. (In ordinary terms they may still be a very irritating person but my responsibility is to how I feel about them – in practical terms that is the only thing I can logically improve on.)

I tell you, it felt good. For the first time I felt I was getting somewhere. I went to see Geshe Doga at Tara Institute again and told him what I was doing. He said that was fine. “But some of these prayers, Geshe-la, this Tibetan stuff, honestly it would be just as much use to me if I said them backwards; I don’t understand one word and don’t expect I ever will. What is the point of saying them three times, etc., etc.?” He laughed and told me, “Sometimes we need some blah blah blah.” I guess it’s just as much work to learn them backwards as forwards.

Afterwards I really did want to do a fire puja. Breaking several summer by-laws in my city I lit a little BBQ fire and got a token range of ingredients together. I couldn’t find black sesame seeds so I visualized the white ones as black. It’s my mind that’s the problem, not the color of the sesame seeds.

I tell you, I had the best fun doing the fire puja out in the back yard, all alone, taking my time, stopping to study details, no one blah blahing me. “Visualize ordinary Adèle in your heart throwing all her bad views in the fire, burning them up,” said Geshe-la. So I got my list out again and went to work on the strong feelings and daily emotions I know so well. It felt fantastic. For the first time I realized why fire pujas are one of the preliminary practices. Now when old Snake-eyes starts up in my heart, I visualize myself throwing her thoughts into the fire, burning them up.

I’ve done fire pujas before and seen plenty, all with serious faces, being worried about missing the next bit, catching up, getting sparks on you and thinking, “Oh, purification.” I just thought: “Ow.” I kept myself nice and finished the things but I have to say, nothing much stuck. This time, with the ritual firmly in my own hands I felt good. Like maybe all is not blah blah blah that first seems so. Especially if it tames my murderous heart. Hundred thousand fire pujas then – how do you do that? Plenty of “ow” I think.

March-April 2000

By Adèle Hulse

I have now completed eight years of work on Lama Thubten Yeshe’s biography, which has produced an archive of 1,500 pages of “story.” I have interviewed and received letters from hundreds of Lama’s students from all around the world and have included everything they told me in these pages.

Some names have been changed to protect people’s privacy in certain cases but basically it is as they told me – in fact, I have maintained a verbatim style in order not to damage, color or alter their stories. Only about five students refused to contribute, usually because they felt their stories were “too personal.”

I considered no detail to be not worth recording, with the result that when a mass of material related to certain events is examined, the picture becomes very clear. So clear that unreliable witnesses are easily identified. I do not believe people wish to become unreliable witnesses but over the last 25 years as stories got told and re-told, exaggerations and embellishments polluted the truth. I am satisfied that the research done has reduced this weakness considerably.

I have had a three-month rest from the work – my first lengthy break from it. I started again at Tibetan New Year, early February, this time working to reduce those 1,500 pages to a publishable easy read of about 600 pages. These will be interspersed with a couple of photo sections. I have several thick albums filled with photos entered in chronological order – but these do not include all the photos there are of Lama. Creating an FPMT image bank on a website is another project altogether and one I hope to assist with later on.

“Not the Dalai Lama” would be the words I most often have to say to people when then ask who I am writing about. I then explain that Lama Yeshe was one of 10 Tibetan teachers who first spread Tibetan wisdom in the West. I add that of those 10, seven were conservative and three were “wild cards.” Of those three, Lama Yeshe was the only one who was a monk – his wildness was not in his lifestyle but in his ability to make people cry with laughter as they learned to open their hearts and change their lives. “Ooh,” people say, “I like the sound of him!” Lama and Lama Zopa Rinpoche were also the first two lamas to enter Australia, where I live.

It’s not over yet, but writing this book has already changed my life. Believe me, my life needed changing. Lama Yeshe changed the lives of so many people. Every day I say a prayer to be able to live long enough to finish this book. I am very happy the work has taken so long and I have been able to be so thorough. When it is finally published we will be able to say, “This book took 10 years.”

In earlier issues of Mandala I indicated the book might take less time but I make no apologies for the delay. Who wants to read a trumped up story of a buddha’s life? I have no doubt that when this book eventually becomes available it will introduce Lama to people who never met him and that their lives will be changed too – not because I am such a clever writer, which I am not – but because of the qualities of Lama Yeshe’s holy body, speech and mind.

April-June 2012

FPMT HISTORY

Big Love, the long-anticipated authorized biography of Lama Yeshe written by Adele Hulse, provides an intimate portrait of FPMT’s founder. This excerpt is taken from the chapter chronicling the purchase of Nowrojee Kotee, renamed Tushita Retreat Centre, and now Tushita Meditation Centre in Dharamsala, India. 

Tushita Retreat Centre, early 1972. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Lama Yeshe buys his guru’s old house in Dharamsala

Back in March [1972], Lama Yeshe had left the meditation course at Kopan suddenly to go to Dharamsala to take teachings from Trijang Rinpoche. While in Dharamsala that time, he also bought a house. When he left Nepal, Lama had flown to Delhi with Jhampa Zangpo where they took rooms in a hotel close to the airport. “Lama was carrying $5,000 in American banknotes, donated by Piero Cerri,” said Jhampa. “We went to see the money-changers, who told us to meet them on the street outside the hotel. A taxi pulled up and we got in and drove down the street a bit. The money-changers gave me a wad of rupees and I gave them a wad of dollars and we started counting. Lama was muttering mantras and laughing, being his usual self, as I counted this huge pile of rupees. Eventually, I finished and they drove off, leaving us on the street six blocks from the hotel with all this money. “The next morning we took a taxi to the bus depot, and after a long hard bus ride to Dharamsala, we went straight to Nowrojee Villa, or Nowrojee Kotee, as the house was called,” said Jhampa Zangpo.

The four-acre property had previously been the temporary home of Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche after the Indian government had allowed the Tibetan government-in-exile to move from Mussoorie to Dharamsala starting in May 1960. Just below Nowrojee Kotee was a building known as the Old Palace, where His Holiness the Dalai Lama had stayed while his permanent residence was being built. Geshe Rabten had also stayed in a small house close by and Kyabje Ling Rinpoche’s house was just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the hill.

Lama could think of nothing more wonderful than buying his guru’s old house.

“Oh Lord, what a run-down old house!” thought Max [Mathews] when he brought her there for the first time. “But Lama just loved the place, which was on a good piece of land. He brought his own lawyer up from Delhi and negotiated the whole deal himself,” said Max.

The house was owned by an old Parsee family, the Nowrojees, who owned and ran the general store beside the bus stop in McLeod Ganj. Mrs. Nowrojee was a consummate businesswoman and the deal did not come cheap. Lama registered the new owner of the house as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as no entity yet existed to hold the property and Lama did not wish to have it in his own name.

When the Dalai Lama first arrived in Dharamsala, his new home, in late April 1960, it was an abandoned British hill station. Dharamsala is located one day’s travel north of Delhi in the northern verges of the Punjab. It is spread among the hills of the Dhauladhar Range, which serves to fence in the Kangra Valley. Under British rule, a military cantonment had originally been established there, followed by the small town of McLeod Ganj, created on a thin ridge facing the plains below, and later surrounded by numerous bungalows occupied by British families during the vacation seasons.

In the dry seasons of the year the forest floors are covered with primrose, mistletoe, and rhododendron, and these are joined, once the monsoon rains begin, by a flood of buttercups, violets, and honeysuckle. Roaming through the forests and hills are panthers, leopards, foxes, jackals, bears, and several kinds of monkeys, while hawks and vultures, pigeons, ravens, and pheasants swoop through the trees at lower altitudes.

After Indian independence and the departure of the British from this once-thriving hill station, only the family of N. N. Nowrojee remained. Long regarded as something like the “guardian spirits” of McLeod Ganj, the Nowrojees are Parsees, having come to India originally as refugees themselves in order to escape persecution in Persia. During the British Raj and afterward, they had been the proprietors of Nowrojee and Sons, the “Europe Store” selling general merchandise to the community, for more than five generations. Entrusted by default after 1947 with caring for the community of abandoned bungalows in which they lived, this family was largely responsible, together with the Indian government, for making it possible for the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama, and the Tibetan government-in-exile to come to Dharamsala and take up residence in 1960.

Piero, Claudio [Cipullo], Massimo [Corona], Carol [Corona], and some other students were already staying at Nowrojee Kotee, which had been renamed Tushita Retreat Centre, when Lama arrived to fill the silent, pine-scented nights with his glorious laughter. Grabbing one student by the arm, he led him round the property and described what he intended to build and where: retreat houses here and here … a stupa over there…. He declared that many people would come there to meditate, transform their minds, and eventually be of benefit to all sentient beings.

“The front room is perfect for meditation,” said Lama Yeshe. “You need an expansive view for that. We can make some heavy dark curtains so there is no distraction.” He wanted his students to have a different kind of expansive view. There was also a big room that had been Trijang Rinpoche’s own room. Lama took that for himself.

Around this time Lama Yeshe gave Massimo and Carol a private Vajrasattva initiation at Tushita. “He had given it to us before,” said Massimo, “but this time it felt so strong and powerful. We were in Lama’s big room and he placed tormas¹ on our heads as we sat in silence with our eyes closed. Then he said, ‘Okay, now think, Massimo, Massimo, where is Massimo? Just think deeply and when you feel “Massimo” is there in your mind, just check that.’ He said it very slowly, with a lot of pauses. I had heard this kind of thing before, but this time, when he said, ‘Okay, this “Massimo” that you see – it is nothing!’ suddenly I felt that what I’d always thought was ‘me’ was now gone. I experienced a real emptiness.”

April 1989

By Adèle Hulse

I survived the furious fifth course at Kopan in ‘84 (was it 100 people who left in the first week?) and repaired to my rooms in Mahankal, just down the hill, to continue a village hippie lifestyle in between pursuing my strange new interest in what was happening on the hill.

A gang of nuns was busy collating the first hardbound edition of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s seminal work, The Wish-fulfilling Golden Sun, and I joined them regularly at their task in a house in Kathmandu. At the end of the day they would all go home to Kopan, home to Lama Yeshe’s house and I would go back to the village. I longed to go with them. Surely to live at Kopan was bliss incarnate. But as we sat around with our work I came to learn that it was no picnic up on that hill; that politics and jealousy were as rampant there as anywhere – in fact it seemed that every human frailty was magnified in that rarified air. I heard that Lama Yeshe said: “If you can live at a center, you can live anywhere!” and I guessed he was right. Why else would he say it! I stayed at Mahankal.

Once, of course, I asked him the big question: “Should I become a nun, Lama?” He roared with laughter and said, “Not you. And you shouldn’t keep too close to a center.” My monastic romance had already collapsed and I felt licensed to rock and roll.

Fourteen years passed and, while I visited several centers and they all felt like home, I never lived in one. I felt I had the imprimatur and held dinner parties instead. Every year I would tell myself several times that sometime before I died I would live in a center. I saw myself an aged nun, comfortably dying in my guru’s house. I should be so lucky.

Then Tara Institute, with whom I had been involved on a business basis for several years, acquired this enormous property in East Brighton. The mortgage was horrific and my rambling rented house was in the same neighborhood. I checked Lama Zopa Rinpoche for credit on my famous license and he pronounced “that time was now over.” Gulp! It was time for me and my eight-year-old son, Thubten Yeshe (I mean, did he ever have a choice?) to move in.

My friends were horrified and could only see my renunciation of a private house and dinner parties as an extreme and unattractive form of martyrdom. And there were times when I thought they were right. For the first three months I dragged my feet when it came time to go back home from the so-called “real world.” We escaped every weekend and stayed overnight at friends’ whenever possible. No one wanted to visit – you couldn’t even light up a cigarette inside! “Why visit?” they said. “You come to us.”

Apart from the rules, there were now all these people I had to live with. I’m used to living and working at home, alone. I am not into running next door for a coffee and a chat. My natural inclination is to avoid intimacy with neighbors and at Tara Institute I felt the same way. The fact that I do work from home and am older than the average resident made it quite simple to establish “my space.”

In our first two weeks as residents, I heard the expressions: “They should…” and “Why doesn’t somebody…”so often that I made a resolve to avoid that sullen verbal slug as much as possible. There is so much to do – such a big garden, floors to wash, so many sticky fingers around the light switches, the refrigerators, the sinks. So many greasy bodies shedding hair and skin in so many showers and always the bath mat stuck to the floor. Why doesn’t somebody … Rosters rose and fell like sets of military orders. Some people did all that was expected of them and more, others toed a rather fascist line and others took no notice at all.

The idea of being rostered to pot-scrubbing once a fortnight abhorred me and I don’t do it; I have an open contract to pay whoever wants the job the night I’m on. I pay well and have only had to cop the pots once. The arrangement suits everybody. Meanwhile roster wars sputter and start with some sort of dreadful inevitability.
I work as a freelance journalist, which means I had to have my own phone. I’m past the stage where I depend on others taking haphazard messages. I also feel past the stage of sitting around cafeteria style and yakking over the evening meal; we have our meals in our rooms. I justify my solicitude somewhat by saying that it’s good for TY. And it is. If he sits at the children’s table, they do disgusting things with their food. If we sit with the adults, they ignore him. There are many aspects of communal living that I simply have nothing to do with. Maybe I’ll “grow into it,” maybe I won’t. I don’t think it really matters.

Months passed. I got to know the lingo of community activity. For a start it appeared to be more bureaucratic than the taxation department. “Them” were the executive committee, “us” were those not on it. Criticisms against the EC were endless, yet when you actually followed the line of attack, it often petered out into the sands of gossip, surmise and wrong information. “Us” got all democratically steamed up over “them,” but every investigation turned the whole issue into thin air. The EC might lay down rules, but no one follows them much and every resident really lives here the way they want to, however that is. Nevertheless, there is still a sense of outrage against authority. As Peter Guiliano, our president, says, “Here are a bunch of people, who are not trained to have authority over others, trying to organize another bunch of people who are not trained at being organized.” It is only the presence of our gurus which stops us killing each other now and then.
For example: “We must have an open fire in the members lounge,” says a group of well-meaning residents. “Sure,” says the EC, “where is the money for the two-storey chimney, who will fetch the wood? Who will clean out the grate or will that be rostered? What about the people who never go in there – should they be rostered too? Grates are very dirty. Wood dribbles chips and dust wherever it goes. And what about the night someone who didn’t help burns the last of the wood all up and it’s freezing?” Pretty soon the EC looks like a monster and the hearth-loving residents feel repressed. Ideas need careful maturing before they should be let out of their cages around here. It does tend to limit spontaneity, but it’s safer.

I don’t get to the gompa much. Teachings are all held at 8:00 p.m. and my son’s bedtime is 8:30 with a story until 9:00. In my first week here I rushed to the gompa at the first opportunity, and after about half an hour realized that what I had done was nothing to do with Dharma. TY was very pleased to see me back. Most of the time I don’t think I’m doing anything “Buddhist” at all here except contributing to the bank payments. That always cheers me up.

What seems to matter most is that now, after eight months, I’m beginning to feel happy to come home. I’m in no rush for communal bliss. I want to live here for a few years with some degree of peaceful consistency – no emotional outbursts, no leaking sulks: something even is what I have in mind.

October 1989

By Adèle Hulse

Around Easter my sister came to stay with my son and me at Tara Institute. She came down from her place in the country, because following a bout of cancer the year before, she was now in uninterrupted pain again. Sure enough another tumor or two were identified, and the long radiation treatment began again. She ended up staying with us for nearly three months.

My sister is a practicing Catholic. She is not interested in becoming a Buddhist, is not an “alternative” person at all. Yet her she was, in an FPMT center at a truly crucial time in her life. Her pain was unremitting and very strong. She took enormous doses of drugs for little effect. Every time she slowly crossed the courtyard gray-faced and wincing, I would spy young residents watching her with numb faces.

“Do you talk to her?” people asked. “What do you mean talk? About death?” I didn’t. To do so felt confrontational, disrespectful, and arrogant. I wondered whether I was failing her and asked Geshe-la: “Should I ‘talk’ to her, Geshe-la? She’s a Catholic – I can’t come out with a whole lot of stuff about colored visions and emptiness, she’d be so embarrassed.” Geshe-la understood completely and assured me there was no need to talk like that. The job was to be kind and give her every comfort possible. What prayers I did were my business.

So after that I took out all the relics I’d hidden in her pillow slips and felt a lot more intelligent and natural. Besides, giving her even the tiniest comfort was a full-time job.

Then we got the news our mother had cancer. An operation was done but her case and age made it incurable. My sister went home and I went up north to my mother. I’m still there.

When I first heard about Mum I went straight to Geshe-la. “It’s natural,” he said. “Death is natural, and you mustn’t worry too much, otherwise you’ll get the same disease. Say Tara mantra.”

How miraculous to have recourse to gurus. I was instantly transported back to a day in March 1974 when I opened a telegram in Kathmandu Post Office informing me that my father had died. All I could think of was “I’m next. As the father dies, so does the child.” I went back to the crowd I knew at Bouddhanath where I was living – hippies and ragers, not Dharma students. I knew well enough there was some big religious scene up at Kopan but it was nothing to do with me. My friends hugged me when I gave my news, offered thick black imported coffee, brandy, smokes. I felt their embarrassed hands around my shoulders and knew I had to get away from them. They couldn’t handle this, and it was not their problem.

Who would listen? Who was actually capable of some wisdom, understanding and real support? I cursed being in such a heathen country. If I’d been in any Western city, I would have made my way to a priest and cried. But there was only this lama, this pagan foreigner on the hill, and I had heard he spoke English. He had to be the Local Rep. There was nowhere else to go.

“What is born must die” were the first words Lama Yeshe said when he heard a girl had come up the hill because her father had died. Those words were exactly what I needed to hear. So simple, intelligent, and accepting. I instantly figured I must be some kind of Buddhist at heart because they washed away all confusion.

Lama scheduled a puja for my father, the first one I had even attended. Bang! Crash! Mumbo-jumbo, white envelopes, khatas and tea, yet I felt incredibly useful and at home. Lama had told me to visualize my father in his most suffering aspect and imagine white light shining through my head onto his face.

“I don’t believe any of this,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “As long as you, his daughter, wish to help relieve his suffering, that is all we need.”

It’s very nice being invited to write for The Mandala because now I can ask all of you to please pray for my family.

April 1990

By Adèle Hulse

The dawning of a New Year dredges up noble resolutions from the sorriest of humans; they renounce cigarettes, booze, drugs and shoplifting. They promise to stop belting the wife, spend more time with the kids. They fill themselves with promise that the future will be good by taking up a new sport, going back to school, polishing their sales ticket.

So if you have never thought about becoming a Member of Tara Institute, this year might be the time to do it. For $240 a year, you demonstrate that you trust our gurus and wish to join hands with their work.

Tara Institute receives no other funds than through the kindness of the members. Here we are in this enormous building, after launching ourselves into real estate seven years ago with an actual cash deposit of $6,000. Now nearly two hundred people come to Tara Institute every week. You’ve got to admit we are doing something right

And the very best thing to do, the wish-fulfilling gem thing to do, is to grab hold of the guru and don’t let go. Follow his every wish and bring laughter to his face and the benefits will serve every suffering living creature in the universe. Two hundred and forty dollars a year, in advance and payable quarterly but preferably once. It’s less than the cost of joining a health club and works better.

Think about it, if miserliness is gripping your purse strings, if the raging mind says, “Oh, no not now! I’m too busy,” then you might like to play the game of thinking, “Well, this isn’t really New Year, I’m a Buddhist and I believe in Losar (the Tibetan New Year), which is in February.” Then when Losar comes you can dedicate especially well by remembering Lama Yeshe, whose anniversary of passing away falls at that time. That would bring laughter to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s face. Every year when he gives his talk on Lama at Losar, Rinpoche cries. Throws his robe over his head, gets out his hanky and goes silent. He is our model of how to love the guru.

Geshe Doga has been with us a long time now. He is like our lost father. Our aim is to provide the circumstances whereby he can give the greatest help to the largest number of people. We have come such a long way. We are doing things right. But the more success, the more responsibility. We are developing a strong physical base, not a fragile one, so it requires an enormous flow of money. Interest payments alone are $36,000 quarterly and that’s before I start taking about sproutings and plumbing bills. Incredibly, we’re holding.

What we’re holding is for you.

Making dedication by paying membership seems an especially attractive New Year’s resolution as we enter the last decade of the century. Rinpoche often likens the chances of hearing Dharma in this age to catching the last carriage on the last train just as it pulls out of the station. Maybe you’re thinking your poor house must be renovated. Maybe it does, but just compare that money against just $2,400 for a decade of Dharma.

I have been the Members Representative on the Executive for two years, but have recently resigned due to necessary family business which will make me even more useless than I have been. I would just like to say that there is not a lot that I have done in my life that I feel really quite proud of, but becoming a Member of Tara Institute is one of them.

Reprinted from Tara Institute newsletter

BIG LOVE EXCERPT

July-September 2012 

Big Love, the long-anticipated authorized biography of Lama Yeshe written by Adele Hulse, provides an intimate portrait of FPMT’s founder. This excerpt is a snapshot from the author’s own life and relationship with Lama Yeshe and is another example of how amazing transformation is possible when a strong student meets a loving teacher.

The July-September 2009 issue of Mandala. Adele Hulse (in pink pants holding gold book) attended a puja lead by Lama Yeshe at Chenrezig Institute, Euldo, Australia, 1976. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Adele Hulse

It was in early March 1974 that the lamas returned to Nepal and met the Australian journalist Adele Hulse who, years later, was to author this biography of Lama Yeshe. She had been in Boudha, the area around the monumental stupa located a 40-minute walk from Kopan hill, since before Christmas. “Having spent 11 years in Catholic boarding schools in Australia,” Adele explained, “religion was the last thing on my mind. I wasn’t keen on Californian ‘Boodhists’ jangling their beads and mumbling about their ‘gooroo.’ Then a telegram arrived with the news of my father’s death. Standing outside the Kathmandu post office, I suddenly realized that I too was going to die one day. The words exploded in my brain: ‘He’s dead. You’re next.’ I looked around me at the people in the street and saw that they too would die.

“I returned to the house full of ‘sophisticated’ hippies I hung around with, but now they seemed childish – they just wanted me to smoke opium and forget about it. I didn’t want to forget about it. I yearned to talk to someone sensible and knew the ‘gooroo’ on Kopan hill spoke English. On my way up there, I ran into the English girl everyone said was crazy. I had met her before in a tea shop and she seemed fine to me. She asked me why I was crying, and when I explained, she clapped her hands and said, ‘Perfect! The lamas can do puja for him and transfer his mind into a pure realm.’ What?

“When I arrived at Kopan, Yeshe Khadro took me to Lama Yeshe’s room. ‘Tell me about your father,’ he said. I explained he was a truly wretched war-damaged alcoholic who had singled me out for consistently vicious treatment all my life. ‘You want to help him?’ he asked. I said I did, and that the girl everyone called crazy had said something about pujas and mind transfers but I didn’t believe in such stuff. ‘Doesn’t matter you believe or you don’t believe,’ he said. ‘Fact is, you are his daughter and you want to help. That all we need. But it should happen on a special day, an auspicious day, so we should do later. Now you tell me – can you visualize your father?’ He said ‘bisualize.’ I certainly could – that huge red and purple head, the stink of alcohol, the ever-present threat of abuse and violence.

“So, you should try to see him in the worst suffering aspect, most drunk, most angry, that one. Put that picture in your heart. Then think that through a hole in the crown of your head comes white radiating light from Lord Buddha, comes down through your heart and washes your father, purifying him of all negativities and sufferings. You think you can do that? Good. So you practice that now much as possible and come back in four days, and we’ll do puja. You will need to pay for small offerings. Yeshe Khadro, she will tell you. Okay, dear, goodbye for now,’ he said.

“Considerably cheered, I went to see Yeshe Khadro again. She said that when she told Lama that my father had died and I wanted to see him, he had said, ‘Yes, dear, everything that is born must die.’ That was exactly what I had realized when I had read the telegram. I had met my guru and I wasn’t even looking for one.

“Four days later I came back with some money in white envelopes for the officiating lamas and more to pay for tea and ‘gompa buns,’ as they were called. It all cost very little. The gompa was full of boys and Injis. Lama Lhundrup was umze [chant leader] and Lama Zopa Rinpoche sat on the throne. Lama Yeshe had a big bundle of burning incense in his hand and walked around throughout the ceremony. I thought it was what he always did, because it was my very first puja. I later learned that it was most unusual. While cymbals crashed and the incomprehensible rhythmic chanting went on and on, I just sat and did the ‘bisualization’ thing Lama Yeshe had taught me. I didn’t understand anything, but felt so comfortable there – and afterward so happy and, somehow, useful. I decided to do the course that was coming up, not because I thought Lama Yeshe was nice, not because I wanted to be a Buddhist – I was busy enough trying not to be a Catholic – but because I knew it required mental discipline and would help me decide if there really was anything more exciting in life than LSD and black Nepalese temple ball hashish.

“Over the next two weeks I continued to visualize my father as instructed and noted that he seemed to appear younger, healthier. He was back to looking as he had in his wedding photos. Was I imagining all this? By this time I’d been at the course for a while and discovered that I had almost no powers of concentration. Then one day I couldn’t conjure him up. No matter how hard I ‘bisualized,’ he didn’t come back.

“I never had to seek out Lama Yeshe; he always just appeared in front of me whenever I felt like talking to him. When I told him my powers of concentration had completely deserted me, he looked deeply into my eyes, bumped his forehead against mine and said, ‘Gone now. Reborn.’ So I stopped trying. I didn’t know what to make of it all, but I felt good about my father for the first time in my life.”

Grief Rooted, watercolor on skin parchment. © 2000 Cathy Weber www.cathyweber.net

“Whenever I am with a group of people who have experienced extraordinary suffering, the first thing I notice is a lightness in the air,” writes long-time FPMT student Adele Hulse. “… [I]f you spend your time with the suffering, you can’t really lose.”

From Mandala October-November 2006.

Adele Hulse

“Back in 1976 Lama Yeshe called me up to his house at Chenrezig Institute in Australia and said: ‘You. You writer. You good understand my language. I want you write por me. You take Chenrezig teaching notes here and make book.’ Lama Yeshe couldn’t say his ‘f’s,’” writes Adele Hulse.

“I spent the next year in a caravan in the mountains rearranging Lama’s ‘language’ into what later became a Wisdom Publications booklet. I loved living alone in the mountains but realized there was more I had to do for Lama, so I moved to Melbourne and began importing books from the Tibetan Library – there were very few Dharma books available in English. This went on for some years and I wondered again about ‘writing por Lama’. How?”

Find the complete PDF on mandalamagazine.org.

Mount Everest Centre students in Bodhgaya, India, 1974. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

One of FPMT founders Lama Yeshe’s and Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s earliest projects was to support and educate the monks of Mount Everest Centre, a group of local boys from Lawudo, Nepal, that later moved down from the high Himalayas to Kopan in the early 1970s, impelled by the harsh climate. Others would later join this group, such as the Western boy Michael Losang Yeshe, who asked to stay at Kopan when he was six.

Adele Hulse records some of Michael’s and his peer’s experiences at Kopan in Big Love, the forthcoming biography of FPMT founder Lama Yeshe. Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive will publish Big Love later this year and has been sharing excerpts from the book on their Big Love blog. The following is from a recent post:

By 1974 Michael Losang Yeshe, then nine, had spent almost half his life at Kopan. Olivia, his mother, now lived in Japan. One day Michael received a parcel from her. “Lama Yeshe heard about it and came to my room,” said Michael. “‘Where is the parcel?’ he asked. ‘Open it.’ He looked inside and handed me a set of colored pencils. ‘These colors, these are for everyone, not just you.’ He pulled out a shirt and underwear. ‘These you can wear.’ Then he saw the fancy Mickey Mouse watch. ‘You’re too young for a watch; you don’t know how to tell time. This for me. I keep for you.’ If I had kept it, I would only have lost it, or traded it for comics or something a few days later. He never did give it back,” said Michael.

Very occasionally the boys were given cash offerings at pujas. When Michael’s father, Yorgo, married a Nepali woman and moved to Kathmandu, he sponsored a big puja at his house. All the boys there received 100 rupees each. When they returned to Kopan Lama took all the rupees from them. They didn’t need money – Kopan did. Yorgo also donated buffaloes to Kopan so the monastery wouldn’t have to buy milk, and he often drove Lama around town on errands.

Lama Yeshe could shift at the drop of a hat from acting the clown to being extremely wrathful. Every inch the abbot, he would walk up and down the rows of small boys in the gompa, making sure they paid attention and not hesitating to discipline them with judicious use of his heavy mala where required.

“I was a naughty one,” said Tenzin Dorje Rinpoche, also known as Charok Lama. “I was lazy and he beat me on the shoulders with his big mala or with a stick. The big wooden malas really hurt. Many boys cried when Lama hit. The Western view is that hitting is bad, but Lama’s motivation and his way of hitting were different. Somehow I was always happy after he hit me. Of course, there were some boys who really didn’t want to be in the monastery and who didn’t like Lama either. But Lama always told us to have an open ear, to listen to everyone for a good education. That way we would develop bigger ideas, which are more beneficial.”…

Read the entire post by Adele Hulse on the Big Love blog.

May-June 1997

By Adèle Hulse

Last issue I told you about the Vajrayogini retreat I faked. Well, I never did the fire puja for that because even though I felt very happy afterwards I didn’t feel I had understood the process and was damned if I was going to confound my limitations by adding some other ritual I understood even less. This is my Dharma practice and I am the best judge of how it affects me. I am not interested in ticking off a list of commitments for frequent flier points.

We had that at boarding school – getting sore knees in the icy chapel, blisters bursting on our fingers and toes as we babbled off “indulgences” – little prayers with credit points that guaranteed a certain number of days less in “purgatory.” “Oh Lord, keep the fires away,” kind of thing. It was pure superstition, on my part at least.

So I thought I’d start again. Vajrayogini is a terrific little retreat; both of mine took 26 days doing only two sessions a day and there is only one mantra. There I was again sitting up in bed with my legs out in front (if Maitreya can do it so can I) trying to focus on that funny little red bam in the heart and pretending I was sending bliss to all sentient beings. But again I felt I was just wasting my time.

“All sentient beings” is the Mahayana touchstone but being so wide and all encompassing, for me it leaves too much undone up close. How can I send bliss to “all sentient beings” when half the people I meet every day irritate the hell out of me? So I had a brain wave: I got out that list of 20 “enemies” I wrote about in a previous column.

It is so scary looking at that list, rubbing my nose in my confession. But there is real energy there, real regret, not just this amorphous “all sentient beings” thing. So I propped up the list and said rounds of mantra focusing on one name at a time.

The tantric deal is of course that while you are pretending to be a deity you can hardly have room to dislike someone. That sort of stuff is a bit beneath deities.

So holding my pathetic attention on the red bam and the name, I send bliss light to that particular person, wishing them to be free from all delusion, releasing that person from all suffering – especially from my unkind view of them. (In ordinary terms they may still be a very irritating person but my responsibility is to how I feel about them – in practical terms that is the only thing I can logically improve on.)

I tell you, it felt good. For the first time I felt I was getting somewhere. I went to see Geshe Doga at Tara Institute again and told him what I was doing. He said that was fine. “But some of these prayers, Geshe-la, this Tibetan stuff, honestly it would be just as much use to me if I said them backwards; I don’t understand one word and don’t expect I ever will. What is the point of saying them three times, etc., etc.?” He laughed and told me, “Sometimes we need some blah blah blah.” I guess it’s just as much work to learn them backwards as forwards.

Afterwards I really did want to do a fire puja. Breaking several summer by-laws in my city I lit a little BBQ fire and got a token range of ingredients together. I couldn’t find black sesame seeds so I visualized the white ones as black. It’s my mind that’s the problem, not the color of the sesame seeds.

I tell you, I had the best fun doing the fire puja out in the back yard, all alone, taking my time, stopping to study details, no one blah blahing me. “Visualize ordinary Adèle in your heart throwing all her bad views in the fire, burning them up,” said Geshe-la. So I got my list out again and went to work on the strong feelings and daily emotions I know so well. It felt fantastic. For the first time I realized why fire pujas are one of the preliminary practices. Now when old Snake-eyes starts up in my heart, I visualize myself throwing her thoughts into the fire, burning them up.

I’ve done fire pujas before and seen plenty, all with serious faces, being worried about missing the next bit, catching up, getting sparks on you and thinking, “Oh, purification.” I just thought: “Ow.” I kept myself nice and finished the things but I have to say, nothing much stuck. This time, with the ritual firmly in my own hands I felt good. Like maybe all is not blah blah blah that first seems so. Especially if it tames my murderous heart. Hundred thousand fire pujas then – how do you do that? Plenty of “ow” I think.

March-April 2000

By Adèle Hulse

I have now completed eight years of work on Lama Thubten Yeshe’s biography, which has produced an archive of 1,500 pages of “story.” I have interviewed and received letters from hundreds of Lama’s students from all around the world and have included everything they told me in these pages.

Some names have been changed to protect people’s privacy in certain cases but basically it is as they told me – in fact, I have maintained a verbatim style in order not to damage, color or alter their stories. Only about five students refused to contribute, usually because they felt their stories were “too personal.”

I considered no detail to be not worth recording, with the result that when a mass of material related to certain events is examined, the picture becomes very clear. So clear that unreliable witnesses are easily identified. I do not believe people wish to become unreliable witnesses but over the last 25 years as stories got told and re-told, exaggerations and embellishments polluted the truth. I am satisfied that the research done has reduced this weakness considerably.

I have had a three-month rest from the work – my first lengthy break from it. I started again at Tibetan New Year, early February, this time working to reduce those 1,500 pages to a publishable easy read of about 600 pages. These will be interspersed with a couple of photo sections. I have several thick albums filled with photos entered in chronological order – but these do not include all the photos there are of Lama. Creating an FPMT image bank on a website is another project altogether and one I hope to assist with later on.

“Not the Dalai Lama” would be the words I most often have to say to people when then ask who I am writing about. I then explain that Lama Yeshe was one of 10 Tibetan teachers who first spread Tibetan wisdom in the West. I add that of those 10, seven were conservative and three were “wild cards.” Of those three, Lama Yeshe was the only one who was a monk – his wildness was not in his lifestyle but in his ability to make people cry with laughter as they learned to open their hearts and change their lives. “Ooh,” people say, “I like the sound of him!” Lama and Lama Zopa Rinpoche were also the first two lamas to enter Australia, where I live.

It’s not over yet, but writing this book has already changed my life. Believe me, my life needed changing. Lama Yeshe changed the lives of so many people. Every day I say a prayer to be able to live long enough to finish this book. I am very happy the work has taken so long and I have been able to be so thorough. When it is finally published we will be able to say, “This book took 10 years.”

In earlier issues of Mandala I indicated the book might take less time but I make no apologies for the delay. Who wants to read a trumped up story of a buddha’s life? I have no doubt that when this book eventually becomes available it will introduce Lama to people who never met him and that their lives will be changed too – not because I am such a clever writer, which I am not – but because of the qualities of Lama Yeshe’s holy body, speech and mind.

April-June 2012

FPMT HISTORY

Big Love, the long-anticipated authorized biography of Lama Yeshe written by Adele Hulse, provides an intimate portrait of FPMT’s founder. This excerpt is taken from the chapter chronicling the purchase of Nowrojee Kotee, renamed Tushita Retreat Centre, and now Tushita Meditation Centre in Dharamsala, India. 

Tushita Retreat Centre, early 1972. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Lama Yeshe buys his guru’s old house in Dharamsala

Back in March [1972], Lama Yeshe had left the meditation course at Kopan suddenly to go to Dharamsala to take teachings from Trijang Rinpoche. While in Dharamsala that time, he also bought a house. When he left Nepal, Lama had flown to Delhi with Jhampa Zangpo where they took rooms in a hotel close to the airport. “Lama was carrying $5,000 in American banknotes, donated by Piero Cerri,” said Jhampa. “We went to see the money-changers, who told us to meet them on the street outside the hotel. A taxi pulled up and we got in and drove down the street a bit. The money-changers gave me a wad of rupees and I gave them a wad of dollars and we started counting. Lama was muttering mantras and laughing, being his usual self, as I counted this huge pile of rupees. Eventually, I finished and they drove off, leaving us on the street six blocks from the hotel with all this money. “The next morning we took a taxi to the bus depot, and after a long hard bus ride to Dharamsala, we went straight to Nowrojee Villa, or Nowrojee Kotee, as the house was called,” said Jhampa Zangpo.

The four-acre property had previously been the temporary home of Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche after the Indian government had allowed the Tibetan government-in-exile to move from Mussoorie to Dharamsala starting in May 1960. Just below Nowrojee Kotee was a building known as the Old Palace, where His Holiness the Dalai Lama had stayed while his permanent residence was being built. Geshe Rabten had also stayed in a small house close by and Kyabje Ling Rinpoche’s house was just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the hill.

Lama could think of nothing more wonderful than buying his guru’s old house.

“Oh Lord, what a run-down old house!” thought Max [Mathews] when he brought her there for the first time. “But Lama just loved the place, which was on a good piece of land. He brought his own lawyer up from Delhi and negotiated the whole deal himself,” said Max.

The house was owned by an old Parsee family, the Nowrojees, who owned and ran the general store beside the bus stop in McLeod Ganj. Mrs. Nowrojee was a consummate businesswoman and the deal did not come cheap. Lama registered the new owner of the house as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as no entity yet existed to hold the property and Lama did not wish to have it in his own name.

When the Dalai Lama first arrived in Dharamsala, his new home, in late April 1960, it was an abandoned British hill station. Dharamsala is located one day’s travel north of Delhi in the northern verges of the Punjab. It is spread among the hills of the Dhauladhar Range, which serves to fence in the Kangra Valley. Under British rule, a military cantonment had originally been established there, followed by the small town of McLeod Ganj, created on a thin ridge facing the plains below, and later surrounded by numerous bungalows occupied by British families during the vacation seasons.

In the dry seasons of the year the forest floors are covered with primrose, mistletoe, and rhododendron, and these are joined, once the monsoon rains begin, by a flood of buttercups, violets, and honeysuckle. Roaming through the forests and hills are panthers, leopards, foxes, jackals, bears, and several kinds of monkeys, while hawks and vultures, pigeons, ravens, and pheasants swoop through the trees at lower altitudes.

After Indian independence and the departure of the British from this once-thriving hill station, only the family of N. N. Nowrojee remained. Long regarded as something like the “guardian spirits” of McLeod Ganj, the Nowrojees are Parsees, having come to India originally as refugees themselves in order to escape persecution in Persia. During the British Raj and afterward, they had been the proprietors of Nowrojee and Sons, the “Europe Store” selling general merchandise to the community, for more than five generations. Entrusted by default after 1947 with caring for the community of abandoned bungalows in which they lived, this family was largely responsible, together with the Indian government, for making it possible for the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama, and the Tibetan government-in-exile to come to Dharamsala and take up residence in 1960.

Piero, Claudio [Cipullo], Massimo [Corona], Carol [Corona], and some other students were already staying at Nowrojee Kotee, which had been renamed Tushita Retreat Centre, when Lama arrived to fill the silent, pine-scented nights with his glorious laughter. Grabbing one student by the arm, he led him round the property and described what he intended to build and where: retreat houses here and here … a stupa over there…. He declared that many people would come there to meditate, transform their minds, and eventually be of benefit to all sentient beings.

“The front room is perfect for meditation,” said Lama Yeshe. “You need an expansive view for that. We can make some heavy dark curtains so there is no distraction.” He wanted his students to have a different kind of expansive view. There was also a big room that had been Trijang Rinpoche’s own room. Lama took that for himself.

Around this time Lama Yeshe gave Massimo and Carol a private Vajrasattva initiation at Tushita. “He had given it to us before,” said Massimo, “but this time it felt so strong and powerful. We were in Lama’s big room and he placed tormas¹ on our heads as we sat in silence with our eyes closed. Then he said, ‘Okay, now think, Massimo, Massimo, where is Massimo? Just think deeply and when you feel “Massimo” is there in your mind, just check that.’ He said it very slowly, with a lot of pauses. I had heard this kind of thing before, but this time, when he said, ‘Okay, this “Massimo” that you see – it is nothing!’ suddenly I felt that what I’d always thought was ‘me’ was now gone. I experienced a real emptiness.”

April 1989

By Adèle Hulse

I survived the furious fifth course at Kopan in ‘84 (was it 100 people who left in the first week?) and repaired to my rooms in Mahankal, just down the hill, to continue a village hippie lifestyle in between pursuing my strange new interest in what was happening on the hill.

A gang of nuns was busy collating the first hardbound edition of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s seminal work, The Wish-fulfilling Golden Sun, and I joined them regularly at their task in a house in Kathmandu. At the end of the day they would all go home to Kopan, home to Lama Yeshe’s house and I would go back to the village. I longed to go with them. Surely to live at Kopan was bliss incarnate. But as we sat around with our work I came to learn that it was no picnic up on that hill; that politics and jealousy were as rampant there as anywhere – in fact it seemed that every human frailty was magnified in that rarified air. I heard that Lama Yeshe said: “If you can live at a center, you can live anywhere!” and I guessed he was right. Why else would he say it! I stayed at Mahankal.

Once, of course, I asked him the big question: “Should I become a nun, Lama?” He roared with laughter and said, “Not you. And you shouldn’t keep too close to a center.” My monastic romance had already collapsed and I felt licensed to rock and roll.

Fourteen years passed and, while I visited several centers and they all felt like home, I never lived in one. I felt I had the imprimatur and held dinner parties instead. Every year I would tell myself several times that sometime before I died I would live in a center. I saw myself an aged nun, comfortably dying in my guru’s house. I should be so lucky.

Then Tara Institute, with whom I had been involved on a business basis for several years, acquired this enormous property in East Brighton. The mortgage was horrific and my rambling rented house was in the same neighborhood. I checked Lama Zopa Rinpoche for credit on my famous license and he pronounced “that time was now over.” Gulp! It was time for me and my eight-year-old son, Thubten Yeshe (I mean, did he ever have a choice?) to move in.

My friends were horrified and could only see my renunciation of a private house and dinner parties as an extreme and unattractive form of martyrdom. And there were times when I thought they were right. For the first three months I dragged my feet when it came time to go back home from the so-called “real world.” We escaped every weekend and stayed overnight at friends’ whenever possible. No one wanted to visit – you couldn’t even light up a cigarette inside! “Why visit?” they said. “You come to us.”

Apart from the rules, there were now all these people I had to live with. I’m used to living and working at home, alone. I am not into running next door for a coffee and a chat. My natural inclination is to avoid intimacy with neighbors and at Tara Institute I felt the same way. The fact that I do work from home and am older than the average resident made it quite simple to establish “my space.”

In our first two weeks as residents, I heard the expressions: “They should…” and “Why doesn’t somebody…”so often that I made a resolve to avoid that sullen verbal slug as much as possible. There is so much to do – such a big garden, floors to wash, so many sticky fingers around the light switches, the refrigerators, the sinks. So many greasy bodies shedding hair and skin in so many showers and always the bath mat stuck to the floor. Why doesn’t somebody … Rosters rose and fell like sets of military orders. Some people did all that was expected of them and more, others toed a rather fascist line and others took no notice at all.

The idea of being rostered to pot-scrubbing once a fortnight abhorred me and I don’t do it; I have an open contract to pay whoever wants the job the night I’m on. I pay well and have only had to cop the pots once. The arrangement suits everybody. Meanwhile roster wars sputter and start with some sort of dreadful inevitability.
I work as a freelance journalist, which means I had to have my own phone. I’m past the stage where I depend on others taking haphazard messages. I also feel past the stage of sitting around cafeteria style and yakking over the evening meal; we have our meals in our rooms. I justify my solicitude somewhat by saying that it’s good for TY. And it is. If he sits at the children’s table, they do disgusting things with their food. If we sit with the adults, they ignore him. There are many aspects of communal living that I simply have nothing to do with. Maybe I’ll “grow into it,” maybe I won’t. I don’t think it really matters.

Months passed. I got to know the lingo of community activity. For a start it appeared to be more bureaucratic than the taxation department. “Them” were the executive committee, “us” were those not on it. Criticisms against the EC were endless, yet when you actually followed the line of attack, it often petered out into the sands of gossip, surmise and wrong information. “Us” got all democratically steamed up over “them,” but every investigation turned the whole issue into thin air. The EC might lay down rules, but no one follows them much and every resident really lives here the way they want to, however that is. Nevertheless, there is still a sense of outrage against authority. As Peter Guiliano, our president, says, “Here are a bunch of people, who are not trained to have authority over others, trying to organize another bunch of people who are not trained at being organized.” It is only the presence of our gurus which stops us killing each other now and then.
For example: “We must have an open fire in the members lounge,” says a group of well-meaning residents. “Sure,” says the EC, “where is the money for the two-storey chimney, who will fetch the wood? Who will clean out the grate or will that be rostered? What about the people who never go in there – should they be rostered too? Grates are very dirty. Wood dribbles chips and dust wherever it goes. And what about the night someone who didn’t help burns the last of the wood all up and it’s freezing?” Pretty soon the EC looks like a monster and the hearth-loving residents feel repressed. Ideas need careful maturing before they should be let out of their cages around here. It does tend to limit spontaneity, but it’s safer.

I don’t get to the gompa much. Teachings are all held at 8:00 p.m. and my son’s bedtime is 8:30 with a story until 9:00. In my first week here I rushed to the gompa at the first opportunity, and after about half an hour realized that what I had done was nothing to do with Dharma. TY was very pleased to see me back. Most of the time I don’t think I’m doing anything “Buddhist” at all here except contributing to the bank payments. That always cheers me up.

What seems to matter most is that now, after eight months, I’m beginning to feel happy to come home. I’m in no rush for communal bliss. I want to live here for a few years with some degree of peaceful consistency – no emotional outbursts, no leaking sulks: something even is what I have in mind.

October 1989

By Adèle Hulse

Around Easter my sister came to stay with my son and me at Tara Institute. She came down from her place in the country, because following a bout of cancer the year before, she was now in uninterrupted pain again. Sure enough another tumor or two were identified, and the long radiation treatment began again. She ended up staying with us for nearly three months.

My sister is a practicing Catholic. She is not interested in becoming a Buddhist, is not an “alternative” person at all. Yet her she was, in an FPMT center at a truly crucial time in her life. Her pain was unremitting and very strong. She took enormous doses of drugs for little effect. Every time she slowly crossed the courtyard gray-faced and wincing, I would spy young residents watching her with numb faces.

“Do you talk to her?” people asked. “What do you mean talk? About death?” I didn’t. To do so felt confrontational, disrespectful, and arrogant. I wondered whether I was failing her and asked Geshe-la: “Should I ‘talk’ to her, Geshe-la? She’s a Catholic – I can’t come out with a whole lot of stuff about colored visions and emptiness, she’d be so embarrassed.” Geshe-la understood completely and assured me there was no need to talk like that. The job was to be kind and give her every comfort possible. What prayers I did were my business.

So after that I took out all the relics I’d hidden in her pillow slips and felt a lot more intelligent and natural. Besides, giving her even the tiniest comfort was a full-time job.

Then we got the news our mother had cancer. An operation was done but her case and age made it incurable. My sister went home and I went up north to my mother. I’m still there.

When I first heard about Mum I went straight to Geshe-la. “It’s natural,” he said. “Death is natural, and you mustn’t worry too much, otherwise you’ll get the same disease. Say Tara mantra.”

How miraculous to have recourse to gurus. I was instantly transported back to a day in March 1974 when I opened a telegram in Kathmandu Post Office informing me that my father had died. All I could think of was “I’m next. As the father dies, so does the child.” I went back to the crowd I knew at Bouddhanath where I was living – hippies and ragers, not Dharma students. I knew well enough there was some big religious scene up at Kopan but it was nothing to do with me. My friends hugged me when I gave my news, offered thick black imported coffee, brandy, smokes. I felt their embarrassed hands around my shoulders and knew I had to get away from them. They couldn’t handle this, and it was not their problem.

Who would listen? Who was actually capable of some wisdom, understanding and real support? I cursed being in such a heathen country. If I’d been in any Western city, I would have made my way to a priest and cried. But there was only this lama, this pagan foreigner on the hill, and I had heard he spoke English. He had to be the Local Rep. There was nowhere else to go.

“What is born must die” were the first words Lama Yeshe said when he heard a girl had come up the hill because her father had died. Those words were exactly what I needed to hear. So simple, intelligent, and accepting. I instantly figured I must be some kind of Buddhist at heart because they washed away all confusion.

Lama scheduled a puja for my father, the first one I had even attended. Bang! Crash! Mumbo-jumbo, white envelopes, khatas and tea, yet I felt incredibly useful and at home. Lama had told me to visualize my father in his most suffering aspect and imagine white light shining through my head onto his face.

“I don’t believe any of this,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “As long as you, his daughter, wish to help relieve his suffering, that is all we need.”

It’s very nice being invited to write for The Mandala because now I can ask all of you to please pray for my family.

April 1990

By Adèle Hulse

The dawning of a New Year dredges up noble resolutions from the sorriest of humans; they renounce cigarettes, booze, drugs and shoplifting. They promise to stop belting the wife, spend more time with the kids. They fill themselves with promise that the future will be good by taking up a new sport, going back to school, polishing their sales ticket.

So if you have never thought about becoming a Member of Tara Institute, this year might be the time to do it. For $240 a year, you demonstrate that you trust our gurus and wish to join hands with their work.

Tara Institute receives no other funds than through the kindness of the members. Here we are in this enormous building, after launching ourselves into real estate seven years ago with an actual cash deposit of $6,000. Now nearly two hundred people come to Tara Institute every week. You’ve got to admit we are doing something right

And the very best thing to do, the wish-fulfilling gem thing to do, is to grab hold of the guru and don’t let go. Follow his every wish and bring laughter to his face and the benefits will serve every suffering living creature in the universe. Two hundred and forty dollars a year, in advance and payable quarterly but preferably once. It’s less than the cost of joining a health club and works better.

Think about it, if miserliness is gripping your purse strings, if the raging mind says, “Oh, no not now! I’m too busy,” then you might like to play the game of thinking, “Well, this isn’t really New Year, I’m a Buddhist and I believe in Losar (the Tibetan New Year), which is in February.” Then when Losar comes you can dedicate especially well by remembering Lama Yeshe, whose anniversary of passing away falls at that time. That would bring laughter to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s face. Every year when he gives his talk on Lama at Losar, Rinpoche cries. Throws his robe over his head, gets out his hanky and goes silent. He is our model of how to love the guru.

Geshe Doga has been with us a long time now. He is like our lost father. Our aim is to provide the circumstances whereby he can give the greatest help to the largest number of people. We have come such a long way. We are doing things right. But the more success, the more responsibility. We are developing a strong physical base, not a fragile one, so it requires an enormous flow of money. Interest payments alone are $36,000 quarterly and that’s before I start taking about sproutings and plumbing bills. Incredibly, we’re holding.

What we’re holding is for you.

Making dedication by paying membership seems an especially attractive New Year’s resolution as we enter the last decade of the century. Rinpoche often likens the chances of hearing Dharma in this age to catching the last carriage on the last train just as it pulls out of the station. Maybe you’re thinking your poor house must be renovated. Maybe it does, but just compare that money against just $2,400 for a decade of Dharma.

I have been the Members Representative on the Executive for two years, but have recently resigned due to necessary family business which will make me even more useless than I have been. I would just like to say that there is not a lot that I have done in my life that I feel really quite proud of, but becoming a Member of Tara Institute is one of them.

Reprinted from Tara Institute newsletter

BIG LOVE EXCERPT

July-September 2012 

Big Love, the long-anticipated authorized biography of Lama Yeshe written by Adele Hulse, provides an intimate portrait of FPMT’s founder. This excerpt is a snapshot from the author’s own life and relationship with Lama Yeshe and is another example of how amazing transformation is possible when a strong student meets a loving teacher.

The July-September 2009 issue of Mandala. Adele Hulse (in pink pants holding gold book) attended a puja lead by Lama Yeshe at Chenrezig Institute, Euldo, Australia, 1976. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Adele Hulse

It was in early March 1974 that the lamas returned to Nepal and met the Australian journalist Adele Hulse who, years later, was to author this biography of Lama Yeshe. She had been in Boudha, the area around the monumental stupa located a 40-minute walk from Kopan hill, since before Christmas. “Having spent 11 years in Catholic boarding schools in Australia,” Adele explained, “religion was the last thing on my mind. I wasn’t keen on Californian ‘Boodhists’ jangling their beads and mumbling about their ‘gooroo.’ Then a telegram arrived with the news of my father’s death. Standing outside the Kathmandu post office, I suddenly realized that I too was going to die one day. The words exploded in my brain: ‘He’s dead. You’re next.’ I looked around me at the people in the street and saw that they too would die.

“I returned to the house full of ‘sophisticated’ hippies I hung around with, but now they seemed childish – they just wanted me to smoke opium and forget about it. I didn’t want to forget about it. I yearned to talk to someone sensible and knew the ‘gooroo’ on Kopan hill spoke English. On my way up there, I ran into the English girl everyone said was crazy. I had met her before in a tea shop and she seemed fine to me. She asked me why I was crying, and when I explained, she clapped her hands and said, ‘Perfect! The lamas can do puja for him and transfer his mind into a pure realm.’ What?

“When I arrived at Kopan, Yeshe Khadro took me to Lama Yeshe’s room. ‘Tell me about your father,’ he said. I explained he was a truly wretched war-damaged alcoholic who had singled me out for consistently vicious treatment all my life. ‘You want to help him?’ he asked. I said I did, and that the girl everyone called crazy had said something about pujas and mind transfers but I didn’t believe in such stuff. ‘Doesn’t matter you believe or you don’t believe,’ he said. ‘Fact is, you are his daughter and you want to help. That all we need. But it should happen on a special day, an auspicious day, so we should do later. Now you tell me – can you visualize your father?’ He said ‘bisualize.’ I certainly could – that huge red and purple head, the stink of alcohol, the ever-present threat of abuse and violence.

“So, you should try to see him in the worst suffering aspect, most drunk, most angry, that one. Put that picture in your heart. Then think that through a hole in the crown of your head comes white radiating light from Lord Buddha, comes down through your heart and washes your father, purifying him of all negativities and sufferings. You think you can do that? Good. So you practice that now much as possible and come back in four days, and we’ll do puja. You will need to pay for small offerings. Yeshe Khadro, she will tell you. Okay, dear, goodbye for now,’ he said.

“Considerably cheered, I went to see Yeshe Khadro again. She said that when she told Lama that my father had died and I wanted to see him, he had said, ‘Yes, dear, everything that is born must die.’ That was exactly what I had realized when I had read the telegram. I had met my guru and I wasn’t even looking for one.

“Four days later I came back with some money in white envelopes for the officiating lamas and more to pay for tea and ‘gompa buns,’ as they were called. It all cost very little. The gompa was full of boys and Injis. Lama Lhundrup was umze [chant leader] and Lama Zopa Rinpoche sat on the throne. Lama Yeshe had a big bundle of burning incense in his hand and walked around throughout the ceremony. I thought it was what he always did, because it was my very first puja. I later learned that it was most unusual. While cymbals crashed and the incomprehensible rhythmic chanting went on and on, I just sat and did the ‘bisualization’ thing Lama Yeshe had taught me. I didn’t understand anything, but felt so comfortable there – and afterward so happy and, somehow, useful. I decided to do the course that was coming up, not because I thought Lama Yeshe was nice, not because I wanted to be a Buddhist – I was busy enough trying not to be a Catholic – but because I knew it required mental discipline and would help me decide if there really was anything more exciting in life than LSD and black Nepalese temple ball hashish.

“Over the next two weeks I continued to visualize my father as instructed and noted that he seemed to appear younger, healthier. He was back to looking as he had in his wedding photos. Was I imagining all this? By this time I’d been at the course for a while and discovered that I had almost no powers of concentration. Then one day I couldn’t conjure him up. No matter how hard I ‘bisualized,’ he didn’t come back.

“I never had to seek out Lama Yeshe; he always just appeared in front of me whenever I felt like talking to him. When I told him my powers of concentration had completely deserted me, he looked deeply into my eyes, bumped his forehead against mine and said, ‘Gone now. Reborn.’ So I stopped trying. I didn’t know what to make of it all, but I felt good about my father for the first time in my life.”

Grief Rooted, watercolor on skin parchment. © 2000 Cathy Weber www.cathyweber.net

“Whenever I am with a group of people who have experienced extraordinary suffering, the first thing I notice is a lightness in the air,” writes long-time FPMT student Adele Hulse. “… [I]f you spend your time with the suffering, you can’t really lose.”

From Mandala October-November 2006.

Adele Hulse

“Back in 1976 Lama Yeshe called me up to his house at Chenrezig Institute in Australia and said: ‘You. You writer. You good understand my language. I want you write por me. You take Chenrezig teaching notes here and make book.’ Lama Yeshe couldn’t say his ‘f’s,’” writes Adele Hulse.

“I spent the next year in a caravan in the mountains rearranging Lama’s ‘language’ into what later became a Wisdom Publications booklet. I loved living alone in the mountains but realized there was more I had to do for Lama, so I moved to Melbourne and began importing books from the Tibetan Library – there were very few Dharma books available in English. This went on for some years and I wondered again about ‘writing por Lama’. How?”

Find the complete PDF on mandala.fpmt.org.