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.”