Impressions

I want to share some still-fresh impressions from the teachings that I’ve been attending.

First off, we’re living with redmeds parents for a week. It’s wonderful to have the whole week to extend conversations over breakfasts and dinners, and really settle in with them. We do live a bit too far away, still.

The event is at Lehigh University in Allentown, PA. The University has made this visit the centerpiece of a whole year’s worth of activity, including classes and other visiting scholars. They have handled the huge event with great class and style. The booklet we were given contains a great summary of the text, as well as all sorts of historical and technical notes. Even the food, which is a “feeding the 5,000” level of challenge has gone off smoothly. They converted all the interior vending stations to all-vegetarian, and provide non-veg options in the building next door. Security is very, very tight, and it takes perhaps an hour to get through the lines … so we get there early and take time to hang out in the air conditioning.

Each day has two sessions, one from 9:30 to 11:30, and the other from 2 to 4. The arena has been perhaps 3/4 full, so maybe 3,500 people in a basketball stadium. This is, interestingly, the same stadium where redmed graduated from high school. Small world.

The stadium has a raised stage at one end, with rows of cushions on either side of a central platform. The renunciates (monks and nuns) sit on stage, along with a few of the organizers. The majority seem to be from the Tibetan tradition, with maroon and saffron robes, but there are a few chinese in their grey, and others that I can’t identify. The audience is a satisfying mixture of the normal and the weird. Aging hippies, stoners, yuppies, college kids, the faithful, the curious, and everything in between. We’re sitting between a man from Ottawa who has been to 5 similar teachings in a year and a half, and a lawyer from Toronto.

The morning session opened with two “warm-up” speakers, since the Dalai Lama was still traveling:

Venerable Thubten Chodron started off. She is a nun, a tiny – slight figure in her robes. Her voice was soft, and they turned the microphone up high to catch it. She spoke about allowing people to affect us, and the fact that we only ever really affect ourselves. “What is criticism? Just sound waves. Just sound waves pushing on my ears. What is it that would get angry, exactly, anyway? Is it my ears? My stomach? My mind? What part of my mind .. there are so many … are my memories angry? Is it my thinking mind? I find that when I dig into it like this, I can never exactly find the anger and it sort of drains away. Further, think about people who hurt others – do you hurt people when you are happy? Or is that the sort of thing you do when you are miserable? This isn’t to suggest pride: ‘oh they’re so miserable,’ but perhaps perspective.” She also dropped a point that wouldn’t be out of place in any sermon I’ve ever heard: “This isn’t to suggest that you just zone out … pleeeeeese Buddha, please give me enlightenment. I’ll be over here napping while you work on that. Ha! This is the hardest work you can imagine! You have to turn your mind away from what you were born with, into something useful for perceiving the truth!”

Then Robert A. F. Thurman took over. He’s a real firebrand. An almost obsessive historian who gave some background and context on the text. He started out sedate, but kept ramping higher and higher. Talking about the period just after the author of this particular text lived, when there were more than 6,000 monasteries in Tibet, a country of 6 million people. “They ran out of budget for the pentagon, they were so busy building monasteries. Maybe we should try that. Open up a branch monastery in the pentagon, just to see how it goes. Speaking of which, where are our world leaders? Do we see the American leaders teaching week long classes on peace and enlightenment? Or maybe they could at least take such a class now and then, take break from killing people.” He made some hearty fun the atheists in the crowd – “You think that you came from nothing? That you’ll just disappear when you die? That something is caused by nothing, and that a thing can simply poof out of existence without a trace? And then you have the nerve to claim to be afraid of death, somehow even though it’s nothing, you’re afraid of it. I guess you’re afraid of nothing. I guess you die and then Richard Dawkins takes over.”

When His Holiness enters the room, the whole place goes quiet and we all stand up. Some people fold their hands, others bow. He greets the monks, prostrates himself before his platform, climbs up and settles in. He usually starts off with a few comments in English before launching into the teaching in Tibetan. He’ll hold forth for 5 to 10 minutes at a time (during which we struggle to stay awake), and then turn to his translator. The translator then explains the point in english for 5 or 10 minutes with occasional corrections and expansions from the platform. I’ve got huge respect for that translator.

I’ve taken over 30 pages of notes so far. I hope to synthesize it someday, but we’re really talking about the core text of Tibetan Buddhism. It’s all in there, and we’re flying through material.

He took questions today, written and dropped in baskets. I dropped mine without much hope of hearing an answer. I didn’t get mine, but I got something better: I was stunned to hear exactly my mom’s favorite notional question that she wanted to ask him. Word for word. “What is it, exactly, that is transferred forward at death? What is it that is reincarnated?” My whole family confirms that I was remembering it right – that’s my mom’s question.

I looked around the stadium, like, “mom?” Somebody put her question in the basket.

The answer was a laugh and an admission that it’s a very complex topic and impossible to give a short answer.

Yay mom. Wish you could be here.

On an unfortunate note, I hear that there will be protesters tomorrow. I hope that they’re peaceful. I plan to get there early and sneak in to sit quietly. I don’t like being shouted at, and I’ve tried reasoning with people with bullhorns before. It doesn’t work.