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.