Vickie Mackenzie

Turning the Mind

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie, recounting the life of Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

After she felt she could go no further with this particular meditation she prayed for guidance on what to do next. She had another dream which told her to examine all the probabilities that could come out of her life.

‘I use to imagine all these white picket fence scenarios–the typical Western dream,’ she continued. ‘I did these meditations where I would suppose my husband and I were always happy–like in the commercials where you run laughing towards each other through the wheat fields. And my son would grow up to be doctor–he’d be wealthy and loving. And I would have other sons and daughters and they would grow up to be successful and happy too. Then I asked myself: supposing I attained every material dream a woman could have in America, then what?

‘I meditated on that. It was turning the mind. I saw that these things, these dreams and hopes were pointless. Where did it lead? After all this, you die. I began to see that there was no future in these kind of endeavors. Even if I were to be totally happy in the world and invested all my time and money in it, there was ultimately no point. I might get the admiration of my peers, and all the riches I could dream of, then I would die. Then what?’

What she was describing was the basic Buddhist meditation on death and impermanence that I myself had done in Kopan back in 1976.

‘I remember meditating on this, holding my son in my arms and thinking how I wanted to protect this little being and feeling I would do anything for him. I remember thinking “I absolutely commit myself to making you safe.” And then I realized in my meditation that I couldn’t make that commitment. If my son were to become terribly ill and die there would be nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t follow him into the after-death experience. I realized I was lying to my baby,’ she said.

This relentless scrutiny of her life, the various ways it could go and the inevitable outcome in death was to have a critical impact on her life. From then on she turned her back on worldly pursuits. In Buddhist terms she had achieved renunciation–the lack of fascination with the ups and downs, the dramas and the joys, of mundane existence. It is said that only when you achieve renunciation do you truly step on to the spiritual path, because only then do you stop believing that following the goals of material existence is the way to happiness.

Ahkön Norbu Lhamo

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie:

After Penor Rinpoche had left, the group dwelt on all that had happened and what he had said. Dutifully they began looking for a property, and sure enough, they found a beautiful place which would suit their purposes perfectly. It had white pillars all along the front. But the price was astronomical. Scraping together whatever money they could, and taking out a huge mortgage (which now necessitates many ingenious fund-raising schemes), they bought what is now KPC and established what over five years later has become the largest ordained Tibetan Buddhist community in the USA. Every Sunday over 120 people came here from the surrounding area to hear Jetsunma’s teachings.

At this stage Jetsunma still didn’t know precisely who she was. That was still to come.

A year after Penor Rinpoche’s visit Jetsunma felt the urge to see again the small, round man who had come into her life and touched her so deeply. She decided to go to India, to his monastery in Bylakuppe in Karnataka state. For the girl from Brooklyn who had never set foot outside the USA, landing in Bombay with its chaos, colour and poverty was merely a prelude for the greater revelation that was to follow.

Facing Penor Rinpoche on his own territory, she said she wanted to take the bodhisattva vows. This is the ceremony in which you formally promise to dedicate your life to the well-being of others. She asked if he would give her a spiritual name, as was the custom at such an occasion.

‘When the time is right,’ replied Penor Rinpoche.

‘When will the time be right?’ pushed Jetsunma, with typical Western impatience.

‘I’ll give it to you when the right day comes,’ continued Penor Rinpoche.

‘When is the right day going to come?’ persisted Jetsunma, not giving up.

‘When I say so,’ retorted Penor Rinpoche firmly.

Jetsunma gave up.

One day, when the moon was in a particular place in the heavens, Penor Rinpoche called her to him and announced: ‘Now I am ready to give you your name.’

He then wrote out her spiritual name on a piece of paper, rolled it up into a scroll, put his personal seal on it, then handed it to her with the white katag (scarf) of respect wrapped around it. ‘That’s your name–Ahkön Norbu Lhamo,’ he said.

There was no apocalyptic vision, not instant flashback to another time, another place, another body. There wasn’t even shock or surprise. Just a sense of intense familiarity.

‘I experienced serious dejà vu,’ was how Jetsunma recalls the occasion. ‘I felt a strong connection to that name. I asked him to say it again. It was like milk to my ears.’

Through his translator he then uttered the monumental words: ‘I now recognize you as the sister of Kunzang Sherab. Her name was Ahkön Lhamo. In that life she and Kunzang Sherab co-founded the Palyul tradition. I recognize you as her incarnation.’

And in those few simple sentences Penor Rinpoche made sense of the extraordinary life that Jetsunma had teched out for herself and the otherwise inexplicable abilities she possessed. This, at last, was the official explanation of how a woman with no Buddhist training whatsoever, no books on Tibetan Buddhism, no teacher, no outward example to follow, had been driven to enter years of strict meditation by herself and to emerge with not only profound wisdom but also the wish and the ability to help others fulfill their spiritual potential.

Beginning Spiritual Training

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie:

‘There was no one to put me in touch with Buddhism. Not at all. The only thing that could have connected me, but didn’t, was that my mother took me to Coney Island and a palm-reader there told me I was an old Tibetan. That was all. I had no idea about Tibet. Not a clue. When I thought about Tibetans I thought of smelly old men on rugs!’

When she ran away from home on the advice of the police she headed for Florida, where she met a man, and married him. She had a baby and they moved on to an isolated farm in North Carolina. That was when Jetsunma’s spiritual story began. Finally away from the hubbub of city life and the distress of her own family situation, the greatness that was lying within her began to evolve. Without any particular emotion or even interest in her voice, she explained the extraordinary series of events that followed.

‘I started to have a series of dreams–I’ve had odd dreams all my life. And in these dreams I would be told what to do. A succession of very strange things happened.

‘Most of these dreams told me to look for a sign. The first involved meeting a an old woman, she was like a witch in a turreted castle. This woman placed a circle on my forehead and said, “This is who you are, now you have to commence.” Three days later a friend of mine asked me to go with her to this woman who did astrological charts, which interestingly are drawn in a circle. We thought it would be a bit of a lark, and so we went. This woman opened the door and, as surely as I’m sitting here, she was exactly the same as the woman in my dream. She had the same face and was wearing the same clothes. I remember breaking out in a sweat!

‘She was really old, but somehow I was very attracted to her. I remember looking at her and thinking she was beautiful. Anyway, she said she wanted to do my chart. After a while she came back and said, ‘My dear, I have nothing to say to you. Your whole life is laid out, you don’t need any advice from anybody.’ I think she was very skillful because she didn’t crystalize anything–she let it stay fluid.

‘Three days later I had another dream which showed me the farm where I was living, but there were extra cars outside the porch. A thunderstorm blew in, and the sky was unusually green. Well, three days after this dream–it all seemed to be happening in three-day-periods–I’d gone out shopping and come home with some friends in their cars and the thunderstorm happened. In the dream the voice had said, “When you see this, it is time to begin your meditation.”‘

To say Jetsunma was taken aback would be an understatement. She was just nineteen years old at the time, and wondered why these things were happening to a poor ‘girl from Brooklyn’. Furthermore, she had no knowledge of or training in meditation.

‘I went out to the front porch and looked at the scene to make sure it was exactly like my dream. It was. Then I went back into my bedroom and lay down! I knew that if I prayed for guidance I would get to learn how to meditate, as the dream had instructed. That was the start of my real spiritual training.” she said. It was to be highly individual and quite unorthodox.

‘The first thing I was “told” was that I had to make a very deep commitment that everything I did from here on would be a channel for blessings. So I use to do this meditation where I would say things almost as if I were chanting a mantra: “I commit myself to benefitting all beings, my life has no meaning other than the benefit of all beings.” Unbeknown to her at the time, she was uttering stock Tibetan Buddhist concepts in stock Tibetan Buddhist jargon. Every day she diligently continued feeling her way along her meditations.

‘The picture I had was of being a faucet–the water was in there, and I just had to turn the faucet on, kind of thing. I tried to align myself with the principle of broad-spectrum compassion.”

Meeting Her Teacher

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie:

I spent a couple of days at KPC admiring the grounds and meeting some of Jetsunma’s followers. One of them was Wib Middleton, a friendly, open man who was one of Jetsunma’s earliest students and is now the chief administrator. I asked him for his impressions of this first female Western tulku as she ventured out on her mission.

‘When we met her it was 1981 and she and her family had moved to Washington. We were really drawn to her. We were a group of seekers, about ten of us, New Age-type people who felt there was a lot more to life and who had an innate sense of wanting to contribute to society. But we didn’t have a vehicle for that. We looked around, but a lot of the New Age stuff seemed to be so self-focused and self-centered. When we met her she had a very expanded way of talking about things. She talked about “planetary consciousness and planetary quickness” and the “vibrational zero” which was her word for emptiness. It was really amazing stuff,’ he said.

‘We went and asked her to teach us, and said said “Sure.” So we began meeting in living rooms about once a week. She started teaching us meditational practices and we’d have discussions which she would lead. Looking back, I can see that she was addressing the specific needs of people around her,’ he said.

‘Although she taught confidently, as though from an inner authority, she never made claims for herself in terms of what her abilities were,’ he continued. ‘She has never done that. In fact, she has always publicly refuted the idea that she has any special qualities at all. She was always very humble. She says things like she is not a very good teacher, that she has no particular abilities. Still, we could see that she had developed certain inner qualities and crossed certain lines of consciousness,” Wib said.

If Jetsunma’s spiritual life was accelerating, her material life was deteriorating quickly. Money and physical comfort were in extremely short supply. She and her family were living in a one-roomed place with crates for furniture. She had steadfastly refused all payment for her meditation classes and was working in the clothing department of a big store while her husband was trying to find a teaching job. When things got really right, Jetsunma announced that she was thinking of returning to North Carolina where her husband had the chance of a teaching position.

‘When we heard that, we went crazy,’ said Wib. ‘We thought, “This is our teacher, we need to keep her around.” The group had grown to about a dozen or more. Late one night we dashed over to her place, knocked on the door and said, “Look, here’s the deal. We’d like to start formal classes. We’ll pay. We’ll start an organization, and the organization pays you.” She replied, emphatically, that she didn’t want to be paid to teach. We said we’d worked it out so that it wasn’t like that. We’d have an organization with a board of directors and we’d take care of it. And that’s what we did. We started formal classes and an organization called the Centre for Discovery and New Life. We had a little logo and a board of directors,’ he recalled.

After that the organization grew organically. Soon there were two classes a week, then three. And all the time the teachings that Jetsunma was giving were becoming deeper and deeper.

‘Every week it would be more mind-stretching, more amazing than the week before. We would walk in and think, “There is no possible way that the information she is going to give us could get more profound”, but it was. She was teaching about the nature of mind, the void, different subtle bodies. At that stage we were between Western metaphysical language and Eastern concepts. We certainly weren’t calling ourselves Buddhists.’

The teachings continued pouring forth out of Jetsunma–week after week. Little did the group know it then, but they were all being prepared for what was to follow. “When it happened, they didn’t notice it at all.”

‘One of our friends introduced us to a Tibetan called Kunzang Lama from a monastery in south India,’ continued Wib. ‘He came to our centre on a rainy night with a lot of carpets he was trying to sell to raise money for the monastery. He also had a book of pictures of small Tibetan kids–mostly young monks who needed clothing, books and food. At the meeting we decided to take them on as a project. None of us knew anything about Tibet and we knew very little about Buddhism. Our knowledge was restricted to Vietnamese monks burning themselves–and there was some confusion with the Hare Krishna movement! It was the typical American response to somebody else’s culture and religion,’ he said, laughing.

Entranced by the pictures of the little monks, they realized there was an excellent opportunity to put Jetsunma’s teachings into practice. ‘Right from the beginning she had emphasized compassion, seeing suffering and doing something about it. She said that suffering came about because thought of ourselves as “separate”. She talked about “union consciousness”–recognizing that there’s one operating principle–and that the one way to understand our own and everybody else’s nature was through love and kindness. She talked a lot about “stewardship” and “caretakership” of the earth and all the creatures on it.’

Within two or three weeks of the carpet-seller’s visit they had managed to sponsor seventy-five children back in south India, and a rewarding correspondence followed. They learned what the little monks were doing and discovered it wasn’t so different from what they were doing in Washington. They also learned that the abbot of the monastery was called His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, who was the head and 11th throneholder of the Palyul lineage of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism.”

The tale fast-forwards a year to when the group received a letter from the carpet-seller saying that Penor Rinpoche was making his first-ever teaching tour of the United States. He wanted to visit Washington to meet and thank the people who had generously sponsored so many of his young monks.

The group was delighted, but had no notion of who or what Penor Rinpoche was nor how to treat him. By this time Jetsunma had moved to a bigger house because they could no longer fit into her living room, but she was still doing everything herself, including all the cleaning, setting out chairs, organizing the coffee and snacks, and of course looking after her family.

Penor Rinpoche arrived in spring 1985. When the group went to Washington Airport to meet him they found a large crowd of Chinese students already waiting to greet their guru. Unknown to the members of the Centre for Discovery and New Life, Penor Rinpoche was an extremely eminent lama with several established centres in Asia. Later they learned that back in Tibet he had been responsible for a hundred thousand monks and nuns situated in over a thousand monasteries. Like most of the great Tibetan lamas he had left his homeland in 1959 after the Chinese invasion. Starting with three hundred followers, he arrived in southern India fourteen months later with only 26: the rest had died on the perilous journey. Undeterred, he took the five acres of land and the elephant that the Indian government offered and, against what seemed insurmountable odds, proceeded to build a monastery that could hold five hundred. When Jetsunma and Wib met him his monastery was crammed to overflowing with 650 monks, many of whom had fled from the continuing persecution in Tibetn.

“Penor Rinpoche had a burning life.” Since he was young he had prayed to meet, in this lifetime, the reincarnation of Genyenma Ahkön Lhamo, the female Tibetan yogini who with her brother had founded his lineage, the Palyul sect, back in 1665. Penor Rinpoche was sure she was living on this earth somewhere. He had already met Ahkön Lhamo’s brother, a Tibetan who was also teaching in America in Ashland, Oregon. But he knew female reincarnates were immeasurably harder to track down. Tibetan yoginis, although reaching the same exalted peaks of consciousness as their male counterparts, were generally free spirits who did their meditations alone in caves. There was no system set up for finding them.

None of this was known to the small group of Americans who turned out to meet Penor Rinpoche’s plane on that spring day in 1985. What followed next was a scene befitting a Hollywood movie. Jetsunma described it to me in detail.

‘We arrived at the airport and there was this huge group of Chinese people who had got wind that he was coming and had arrived with a limousine. They knew who he was. We didn’t have a clue. They were all grouped around something or someone I couldn’t see, clicking their cameras and carrying on. Now Penor Rinpoche is short, about five foot three inches, and fat. I tower over him. I thought, “Well, I guess he’s in there somewhere, but what’s happening?” Somehow the sea of Chinese people parted, I saw him, and burst into tears!

‘Now I’m not the sort of person who usually does this kind of thing, you understand. I’m a hard-headed lady. I’m from Brooklyn, for heaven’s sake!’ she joked. ‘But I just could not pull myself together. I felt like such a ninny. I cried and cried, I just looked at him and thought, “That’s my heart…That’s my mind…That’s everything.” ‘ Her voice was soft. “How do you feel when you have just seen everything? I just knew that was it. That was what I’d been looking for my whole life. And the tears poured down my face.’

I asked her precisely what that meant.

‘Padmasambhava, the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, actually said, and I’ll paraphrase “I will reappear as your root teacher, the one with whom you have such a relationship that you understand the nature of your own mind. When you meet your teacher you will in some way see your own face, and it will be the face that turns around and moves you. It is the beginning of your awakening.” ‘

 

Jetsunma’s Early Life: from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie

I was fortunate to see her. She had been engaged in a long retreat and was also suffering from the flu–yet she agreed to break her silence to talk with me. I was eager to hear this American dakini’s tale.

‘I’m really just a girl from Brooklyn,’ she began, eyes twinkling with humor. In fact there was little in her background to laugh about. She came from a poor family beset with problems. There was alcoholism, violence and abuse, which she was reluctant to say much about except that she was advised by the police to leave home when she was seventeen. ‘It was a very difficult situation, very difficult,’ she said quietly. ‘As soon as I was able to stand on my own two feet I left. But I did it all right. I managed pretty well,’ she added, wanting to make light of what was obviously a horrendous childhood.

“It was a very mixed religious household with quite a lot of tension surrounding belief. It’s a strange history. I didn’t know my father but my stepfather was Catholic. My mother’s parents were Austrian/Dutch Jews and when she married my stepfather, as she would not be Catholic, she decided that the Dutch Reform Church would be a good compromise between Judaism and Catholicism. She was what we called a ‘lox and begals’ Jew, a cultural Jew, who didn’t really know what was going on other than the food!” Jetsunma said with a deep, throaty laugh.

“I didn’t know my real father but my stepfather was Catholic.” There was a real battle in my house as to how the children should be raised. When my stepfather was winning I was Catholic, which meant I was baptized a Catholic and went to Catholic school where I was taught catechism and the rest. When my mother was winning, or when she could absolutely stand no more of the nuns, she would take me out of catechism and put me into the Dutch Reform Church.’

It seemed to me in the light of the what was to follow that her background, hard though it was, probably helped shape her destiny. The violence in her home must have honed her sensibilities to the suffering of the world, both mental and physical, while her Judaeo-Christian schooling would have given her a first-hand knowledge of the very roots of our Western civilization–an invaluable asset when teaching the principles of avery different belief. Jetsunma would know from personal experience the background of most of her audience.

She was a naturally spiritual child, she continued, with a reverence for Jesus which abides to this day. ‘I feel an enormous devotion for him. I think he is one of the greatest bodhisattvas of the world,’ she said. But she also had an inexplicable attraction to Buddha statues. ‘I use to buy them all the time and either give them to my mother or keep them for myself. I remember when I went through my hippy phase I had my room decorated in psychedelic Buddhist posters and had a Buddhist altar. I had an affinity to it. I liked the simplicity. I didn’t know anything about Buddhism, to tell you the truth, but there was something about it that felt normal.’ She also remembers having beatific visions at the age of ten on her top bunk. And she had prayers that were all her own.

In spite of her innate spirituality she found nothing in either churches or synagogues to attract her. ‘I didn’t like the way religion was practiced in our country,’ she said. ‘It seemed like a vapid experience. People did not seem to pick up any clues from it as to how to live their lives. I don’t ever remember, for instance, being told to care for all sentient beings. I was told to be a good girl, a nice girl, which boiled down to morality. We all knew what good and nice girls didn’t do!” she said.

‘Certainly in my family I noticed that those same parents who could go to church and do all the right things could come home and beat the stew out of their kids, in the same day! To my mind there was something desperately wrong with that–especially when I was the one getting the stew beaten out of me. For a while got really angry with “religion’ and rebelled against it.’

One thing is sure. In this very eclectic religious and radical background that shaped Jetsunma’s early life, there was absolutely no hint of the Tibetan Buddhism which was to emerge so brightly, of its own accord, later in her life. No secret influence, no teachings could be discerned that would explain the emergence of the pure Buddhist philosophy that was to spring automatically from her lips.

 

Early Practices: The Life of Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West”  by Vicki Mackenzie as she recounts Jetsunma’s life story. This section begins as Jetsunma describes her early practice:

‘I left the party at that point,’ was how she put it. ‘I felt “There’s nothing here.”‘ Her meditation then took a quantum leap–right to the heart of mysticism, to the fount of truth.

‘In my next dream I was guided to meditate on the question “If what I have here does not amount to much because it is so finite, then what is there of value?”‘ Suddenly she found herself contemplating absolute reality, or ultimate truth, the primordial wisdom state and the most profound and difficult subject of all Buddhist meditations.

‘I didn’t have the words for it but I knew it wasn’t like God, the old-man-on-the-throne idea. What I was meditating on was a non-dual, all-pervasive essence–that is, form and formless, united, indistinguishable from one another. I saw that it was the only validity–that and the compassionate activity that was an expression of it.’

What Jetsunma was telling me was, I recognized, quite exceptional. What yogis and scholars in Tibetan monasteries take years to achieve after long intellectual delving and even longer years of retreat, Jetsunma had arrived at entirely of her own accord. Tucked away on her farm in North Carolina without any guru, any book, any established doctrine or example to follow, she had not only discovered but realized the two essential truths–wisdom and compassion, the two wings of Tibetan Buddhism that are said to fly you all the way to Enlightenment. Without them you can barely get off the ground. It was an amazing feat.

But she didn’t stop there. While she continued to meditate on absolute nature and compassion she simultaneously began to offer up her body, part by part.

‘This is going to sound strange,’ she said, laughing, ‘but I would lie down–I didn’t know you were suppose to do all of this sitting up–and I would look down at my feet and say, “OK, here they are, ten toes.” And I would really look at my feet and consider all the things that my feet could do for me. And then I  would contemplate what was the ultimate good of these things–no ultimate use at all!” ‘ She would continue in that vein throughout her body, staying longer on the parts she felt attached to. ‘No one wants to give up their head, for instance. Our head is like the last bastion of our individuality. And I’d pay special attention to my female parts and my hands. You don’t want to do without them!’

She didn’t know it then, but what she was doing was no less than Chöd, another profound Tibetan meditation whereby you relinquish your body to emptiness for the good of all. It is considered the ultimate physical surrender. How she had come across such a strange meditation in the middle of North Carolina, with only a baby and husband for company, adds to the mystery. I asked again, to make sure, if there were any outside influences that could have been directing her.

‘We were in Ashville in the seventies and nothing metaphysical was happening there,’ she replied. ‘Actually there was one thing–a small transcendental meditation centre had started and friends kept urging me to join. But I resisted. It didn’t feel as though it was the right place for me. They said I had to have a guru, that I couldn’t get anywhere without one, and I replied, “That may be true, but I haven’t found my teacher yet and I will know when I do.” ‘

She continued these intense periods of individual meditation over several years. ‘I would meditate for hours at a time. Luckily I had a baby who was peaceful and slept a lot, and a husband who was supportive of what I was doing. I am eternally grateful for that. But it was still a householder’s retreat. I had a husband, a child and all the chores to do. Even so, I had a much stricter schedule of meditation than I do now.’

The meditations grew in strength and clarity, and when she was around thirty she had a spiritual experience which showed that the time to begin her work had begun. She was reluctant to tell me about it, except to say that she entered a long period of meditation from which she emerged knowing that her personal life had finished and that she had been born solely to be of benefit for others. ‘I never said anything to anyone about it. But oddly, after that people started coming to me.’

 

 

Authorization to Teach: from “Reborn in the West”

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie:

Before receiving her bodhisattva vows she had told Penor Rinpoche of her own vow that she was teaching to her students: ‘I dedicate myself to the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings. I offer my body, speech and mind in order to accomplish the purpose of all sentient beings. I will return in whatever form necessary, under extraordinary circumstances, to end suffering. Let me born in times unpredictable, in places unknown, until all sentient beings are liberated from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Taking no thought for my comfort or safety, precious Buddha make me a pure and perfect instrument by which the end of suffering and death in all forms might be realized. Let me achieve perfect enlightenment for the sake of all beings. And then, by my hand and heart alone, may all beings achieve full enlightenment and perfect liberation.’

Penor Rinpoche had rocked to and fro in unbridled mirth, slapping his thigh in amusement. She had replicated, almost exactly the same prayers that Tibetan lamas spoke. It was another proof of her identity.

He handed her another certificate, authorizing her to teach. ‘This is important,’ he said. ‘People will say you haven’t been studying the dharma, that they have never heard of you. They will not understand. With this paper no one will doubt that you are capable of teaching the dharma.’

Penor Rinpoche went on to tell Jetsunma a little about her famous ‘predecessor’. The first Ahkön Lhamo was the direct student of Tertön Migyur Dorje, a famous revealer of secret teachings, he said. She was a great dakini and spent decades in retreat, only coming down from her cave to help her brother with his monastery. Otherwise people would go to her to receive healing and teaching.

I asked Jetsunma if she were curious to find out more about Ahkön Lhamo or had any memories of the yogini who had lived in Tibet in 1665 and had inspired a religious order that had survived to this present day.

‘I discovered she was pretty wild,’ she replied. ‘She stayed up in her cave and looked pretty wretched, with her hair sticking out all over the place,’ she said, picking up her own unruly locks. ‘She was a crazy yogini type. Some things never change! There was no water in her cave, of course, and she never bathed. Her clothes were rotting on her. But people said whenever they went to her cave it would smell like perfume. Penor Rinpoche told me that people would give her turquoise, gold and coral, but she would refuse it. She was probably holding out for gifts she could accept, like hair-driers! She was probably waiting for electricity to be put into her cave and she could have central heating!’ she joked.

‘As for any memories, I don’t like to make any fuss about the inner experience I have. I can tell you I have some awareness of it, but it’s pretty “Swiss cheesy”. I am curious. I want to go back to Tibet, to see the cave where she practiced. Gyaltrul Rinpoche, the reincarnation of Kunzang Sherab who is now in Oregon, said that when he went back to Tibet he remembered a lot. It’s as though the airways are clearer there.’

There is at least one concrete link between this latter-day bodhisattva, the girl from Brooklyn, and the seventeenth century Tibetan yogini who had helped found a Buddhist lineage. Ahkön Lhamo’s skull, or part of it, is still in existence. It bears an unmistakable hallmark of sanctity. On its top is etched the holy sanskrit syllable ‘Ah’.

The story goes like this. When the first Ahkön Lhamo passed away, they prepared a pyre to cremate her and duly put the body on it. When the last vestige of flesh was burnt away, the skull rose up in the air in front of hundreds of people and flew about a mile before landing at the Palyul monastery, at the foot of her brother Kunzang Sherab’s throne. This was considered the final ultimate display of Ahkön Lhamo’s power and spiritual accomplishments. The great dakini, who was already known for the many miracles she performed, had revealed her true greatness.

The skull became a most treasured relic and was used as a kapala, and instrument used in ritual ceremonies for holding nectar. It remained intact until in the mid-twentieth century the invading Chinese hacked to pieces everything of spiritual significance, including the precious kapala at the Palyul monastery. A lay person saw a piece of the skull among the rubble and, hiding it in his clothes, took it to safety. It was some years before Penor Rinpoche got word that at least part of the holy relic had survived.

The was a vast gap in time between 1660 and 1949, when the present Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo was born. I asked her the same question I had asked Tenzin Sherab. What lives did she think she had been living in between?

‘I think there were other incarnations, but as Penor Rinpoche told me, they don’t keep track of women. It wasn’t because they were prejudiced against women’s wisdom. In fact, dakinis are the primordial wisdom beings and are held in very high regard. Generally, though, dakinis were not the lineage holders. They spent their lives in solitude, doing spiritual practices. Penor Rinpoche says, and I feel, that there have been many incarnations.

But this present one, as the American woman doing it ‘her way’ as undoubtedly she always had, was the life that was to capture widespread attention. Jetsunma left the United States as a married woman, mother of two and teacher of New Age metaphysics with a bent for worldwide caring, and returned a recognized tulku, a reincarnate lama. For her students this took some adjustment. While they had been happily following the teachings of a woman whom they treated as their equal, they now had to contend not only with a ‘Buddhist’ but also with someone whose rank placed her on an entirely different footing. There was protocol to observe, a new language to learn for the same concepts they had learnt, and the mantle of an old and established ‘religion’ from the East to adopt. Some disciples fell out, but most survived the transition.

Whatever misgivings they might have had about the authenticity of their teacher’s new lofty reincarnate status, however, were completely dispelled when Penor Rinpoche came to see them for the second time in 1988. “He arrived at Poolesville with twelve monks in attendance and conferred the Rinchen Terzod, the revealed teachings of the great Padma Sambhava to all member of KPC. It was the first time he had ever performed the task in his lifetime, and the first time in North America”.

He then conducted an official enthronement of Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo. News of the thirty-nine-year-old woman who had been recognized as the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan yogini reached the media. Newspaper reporters and television crews descended on KPC. ‘Meet Ahkön Norbu Lhamo, Tibetan Saint,’ blazed the front-page headline of the International Herald Tribune. ‘The Unexpected Incarnation’ cried the Washington Post. She appeared in the popular People magazine. Leading Japanese and German magazines ran articles on her. This was when my own journalist’s antennae, primed for good stories, must have picked up the importance of the event and stored it away for later use.

The Guru

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vicki Mackenzie. This section begins with Jetsunma discussing the role of the guru:

She went on to talk a little about the place of the guru in Buddhism. ‘The guru is an emanation of enlightened compassion, and that compassion is like a hook or a piece of Velcro,’ she explained, slipping into her hallmark mode of putting Eastern concepts into Western terminology. ‘Now Velcro has to have a corresponding piece, otherwise it won’t connect–which means that at some time in the past you have already had a relationship with the guru. It is not as though the teacher will know your name, or something like that. But the power, the intention of compassion and loving kindness sets up a vibration, almost like a sound, and students begin responding to that vibration. And the student will be called.

‘That sound is so subtle, yet so powerful, that it changes the student’s life–like that,’ she said, clicking her fingers. At this point I realized she was talking about herself as ‘guru’ too. ‘And it can sustain that change. It can change the world. That sound is the greatest, most gossamer force there is–bodhicitta, the force of compassion. That’s the sound that is being vibrationally cloaked to suit the student’s mind,’ she explained.

At Washington Airport, however, Jetsunma had no idea that the small, rotund man who was making her weep was her guru; that was to come. Instead she was contemplating how to get him back home and what to give him for lunch. He eventually scrambled into her old car and was driven back to Poolesville, where the group fed him hot dogs and potato crisps on the back porch. For an auspicious meeting it was, like Jetsunma herself, highly irregular.

‘We didn’t know what to do with him,’ she confided. ‘We had a barbecue going and were sitting down next to him, being friendly and chatty. I had no idea one doesn’t do this. Be he seemed really happy to be with us and said he wanted to meet all my students and ask them questions. I was amazed. He added that we could ask him questions too. Now that I could understand,’ continued Jetsunma.

All week long Penor Rinpoche interviewed all of Jetsunma’s students in great depth, probing to find out exactly what she had been teaching them. When eventually Jetsunma herself managed to get some time with Penor Rinpoche, she acknowledged him as the teacher and confessed her ‘sin’ of teaching without any real qualifications.

‘Forgive me, but I did not feel I could sit and do nothing,’ she said. ‘But the authority under which I’ve been teaching is twofold. First of all, I look around me and see there is suffering, and I have to do something. The other is that I’ve tried my own practices and I know that they work. But I don’t really know why these teachings come to my mind. Can you please tell me where it comes from?

Penor Rinpoche looked her straight in the eye and broke the news–at least, part of it. ‘In the past you were a great bodhisattva, a person who works throughout all time to liberate sentient beings. You have attained your practice to the degree that in every future lifetime you will not forget it. You will always know it, it will always come back to you. It is in your mind and will not be forgotten.’ He gave her no name, no clue as to what kind of bodhisattva she had been. He just advised her to keep on doing precisely what she was doing, in the way she was doing it, and confirmed that her teachings were exactly what her students needed. That was all. It seemed that no great demands were to be made of her–until he dropped the bombshell.

‘He told me I had to buy a centre, a real temple, that I shouldn’t be afraid. He said I was going to see several different places but I had to buy the one with the white pillars in the front. “You’re going to think you can’t afford it,” he said–and oh, we can’t!–“but you will find a way. Have faith, it will be all right. Eventually,” he added, “you will have places all over the world.” The last part of the prophecy is still to come about.

 

Fully Awakened Glorious Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light

by

The following is respectfully quoted from “Reborn in the West” by Vickie Mackenzie:

The journey to Poolesville, Maryland from New York had taken almost four hours. First one of those silver cigar-shaped trains from Penn Station in downtown Manhattan to Washington, D.C. Then a modern automatic train to Poolesville, green and lush, in the wealthy outskirts of the nation’s capital. I had had much time to ponder.

I recalled how, several years previously, I had read in a newspaper about a woman who had been recognized as a Tibetan tulku and who had run prayer vigils for world peace. That was the sum total of all I knew. Somehow, this small snippet of information had lodged in the outskirts of my brain, to be called up when the notion of this book appeared. Now, on the train rattling down the eastern seaboard of the United States, the idea of meeting a woman Western tulku beckoned alluringly. This, after all, was a rare commodity indeed: a female who had been granted the highest spiritual accolade and authority within the overly masculine world of Tibetan Buddhism. And a Westerner at that. Tracking her down, however, had not been easy. I had not been able to remember her name, and since her official enthronement in 1988 she had kept a very low profile. Through various Tibetan contacts in the USA I finally found her. Her name was Jetsunma Ahkön Norbu Lhamo, and she had a centre just outside Washington.

Over the seventeen years I had been visiting Tibetan Buddhist centres I can honestly say I had seen nothing like the one that was about to greet my eyes. It glistened in the sunlight, a grand, two-story white house fronted by six vast white pillars, looking for all the world like an exclusive country club. I reached this imposing edifice by means of a winding drive flanked with rows of tall flagpoles, immaculately manicured lawns and flower beds. Glancing up to the roof, I saw the first sign of the place’s true identity–two golden deer supporting a golden Dharma wheel, the national emblem of Tibet. And there, written large on a sign near the entrance, was the equally foreign name: Kunzang Odsal Palyul Changchub Chöling. Since its English translation was even more of a mouthful–the Fully Awakened Glorious Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light–it was called by its inmates simply ‘KPC’.

If the exterior was impressive, the inside was breathtaking. A large central staircase swept up from the central hall to the upstairs rooms, and the whole place was carpeted wall-to-wall in beige. But this paled into ordinariness when I entered the two gompas, without doubt the most beautiful shrine rooms I had ever seen. They were crystal palaces–around the walls was an extraordinary array of huge crystals, strategically placed on plinths and individually lit, like museum pieces. It was, I was told later, the biggest crystal collection outside the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

The first gompa, where the teachings and ceremonies take place, was hung with royal blue and gold curtains and furnished with fine chairs for those who could not sit cross-legged on the floor. The throne for the teacher stood under a canopy of red, gold and royal blue. In the middle of the room was a huge mandala, surrounded by golden stupas at the base. Against one wall was a statue of Padma Sambhava, the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, and in front of it was the biggest solid round crystal of all. The effect was extraordinary–a cross between sumptuously exotic Western drawing room and a magic Eastern temple. It occurred to me that no man in Tibetan Buddhism would ever have had the courage to produce such a place of worship, let alone envisage the concept. It managed to break all bounds of convention, and yet remain unmistakably a gompa of Tibetan Buddhism.

The second gompa was even more fabulous. This was the prayer room, lit by candles, where the twenty-four-hour vigil for world peace still goes on. In the semi-light I picked out yet more gigantic crystals, individually glowing, and the impressive sight of a wall lined with 1,002 small Buddha statues standing neatly row upon row, like sentinels watching over the holy activity taking place before them. I had seen such sights in Tibet, where entire walls are painted with thousands of Buddhas turning black with accumulated grease of millions of burning butter lamps–but nothing could match the pristine splendor that Jetsunma had created in here in the Poolesville countryside. Turning round to view another wall, I saw an equally amazing spectacle–a display of of twenty-one golden statues of Tara, the female aspect of the enlightened mind which represents fast, effective action; they stood in tiers, like some beautiful female spiritual court. It seemed an accolade particularly appropriate here. With a solitary monk sitting on his cushion sending out prayers for universal harmony and compassion, and the taped voice of Jetsunma herself crying out her haunting invocation for the Buddha to be present, the room vibrated with spiritual power.

Who was the woman who had created all this? Jetsunma Ahkön Norbu Lhamo walked into the upstairs sitting room emanating warmth, a discernible kindliness, a bubbling vivacity and, it has to be said, in appearance at least, a middle-of-the-road American ordinariness. She was dressed in a straight-cut beige skirt and top and was wearing make-up and fashionable dangly earrings. Her fingernails were long and painted, her dark brown curly hair was shoulder-length and wild. She was tall, rounded and in her early forties. Nothing gave away her unique status except for the mall–a string of prayer beads–which she played with constantly in her hands; that and the fact that, with her dark, slightly almond-shaped eyes, her slightly down-turned mouth and the general shape of her face, she had a distinctly Tibetan look about her.

I learned that she was, in fact, a walking example of curious contradictions. In the modern Western way she had been married and divorced, more than once. She was the mother of three children–two sons, now in their twenties, and an adopted girl aged five. She lived in a house behind the centre where she cooked, scoured mail order catalogues for clothes (one of her passions), and looked after her husband and family just like millions of American women all over the country.

And yet in the ancient Eastern way, she carried the name ‘Jetsunma’–a title more honorific even than ‘Rinpoche’, the recognition bestowed on male reincarnates. Here before me, in her make-up and high heels, was a woman who had been hailed as a ‘Sublime Incarnation’, no less. Here was a woman who, it was said, had achieved the spiritual mastery from which she could be reborn in any form she chose and teach directly from her own memory, without any formal training. It was a rare accomplishment indeed. Unlike the other tulkus I had met, Tibetan and Western alike, Jetsunma Ahkön Norbu Lhamo had not been discovered at an early age, nor taken into any Tibetan monastery to bring forth her potential. She had developed it entirely by herself, secretly and alone in the middle of America without help from anyone. The testimony of what she had achieved was there for all to see: the magnificent centre with its beautiful grounds, its exquisite meditation rooms, and the thriving community of followers she had gathered around her. This was clearly one very special lady indeed.

 

 

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com