My experiences as a Tibetan Buddhist, written under the username AmLearning January 19, 2004

THE WRITINGS OF AMLEARNING - 1/19/04
Site Map		Tiger Lily said: "I'm just starting to realise how terribly painful and confusing that must have been to receive such gross sexual advances from men you were wanting to see in a pure fatherly light. I understand your anger at coming to a forum where you felt people weren't listening or not caring about your pain. Not caring about you. I think if you give us time, we are all here for you. How you must loathe the very word Dakini that has been so misunderstood by western practitioners and the Lamas who played around with their sex, projecting a deluded Dakini vision onto a woman and so invalidating her as a woman in her own right." Hi dear Tiger Lily, Hmm, it's nice to be challenged to think about things in new ways I think, when the intentions behind the challenge feel well-wishing and if genuine consideration has gone into the challenge. I appreciate what you said to me in that light and have been mulling over what you said. Human beings live in a continuum of time. Who we were as children, what culture was our background, our language, family history ... it and our individual response to what we were born into, our reactions and actions, all go into who we become as adults and what we are attracted to, what we choose to do or feel compelled to do with our lives. I was attracted to the 4 Noble Truths because as a 10-year-old I sensed the hypocrisy in the pill-box hatted, white-gloved, Stepford wife, Jackie-Onassis-as-a-role-model that was being dished out to females in 1963. The pill-box-hat reality did not feel sane, safe or good to me at the core. I don't know why but it didn't. Maybe it was because I grew up in a privileged environment and at the same time suffered serious abuse in that arena. Rich and white became something to hate for me but I had no ideas about any other life that could possibly be a Good Way To Live And Think. The 4 Noble Truths leapt off the page of my history book and burned into my child's mind as a possible way out of my suffering that came with fancy trappings. I was being badly abused at home. I'm lucky to be alive, it was that bad. It was my biological mother who was the abuser. My dear father, who was a scientist, had abandoned us kids and left, after he’d tried to handle his violent, psychopathically-traited wife, who I learned about 7 years ago has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Here was somebody, the Buddha, in this 4th grade history book, talking about suffering, and a path out of that suffering, not just trying to white-glove it away. So I went to the local museum and looked at the stone heads and statues of the Buddha, with their serene expressions, simple, dignified postures, and yearned for what seemed to me like wise composure in the face of openly knowing about suffering. But at that time I had NO idea how to learn about Buddhism. I went to book stores and read koans, but what could I get from the idea of one hand clapping? Zip. Where was the understanding there? It made no sense at all! And I sensed in those books some sort of smug ridiculing knowing about anything or valuing the mind or life. It felt nihilistic to me. Nope, Zen was not for me. Then Evans-Wentz' book on the bardo ... that made a different kind of NO sense to me, some anthropological fascination with views on death? What good was that to me? None that I could see. Years later I read Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism in the winter of 1974, just after I turned 21 and went to live in Rome, in a room in an apartment with an elderly woman landlady. Reading that book affected me so profoundly, I went into a sort of fevered delirium I'd never experienced in my life. Maybe I got some sort of bizarre illness that lasted 3 days with no other symptoms than a raging fever ... whatever it was, I spent 3 days in bed, with my landlady bringing me soup in the afternoon after I spent 23 out of the 24 hours in some nightmare dream state. The dream was about the realms of suffering, the earth covered with misery in a Boschian purgatory. What could be the way out of that endless suffering?! That book gave me no answers. I had no idea that Trungpa was Buddhist or that there were living teachers. I thought Buddhist teachers had all died out. I really did. I thought there was no way out of all this suffering and I just didn't want to live any more. It cast me into suicidal depression. After packing my belongings and saying goodbye to my kind landlady, I rented a hotel room in Albergo Paradiso, fully enjoying the irony in the name of this squalid flea pit of a hotel, that looked out over the statue of Giordano Bruno, the alchemist who had been burned at the stake in that plaza, Campo Dei Fiori, in Trastevere. I didn't die; I couldn't razor blade deeply enough. My squeamishness kept me alive, and I left Rome in a depressed daze to live on a tiny island in Greece, by myself, to work on being a writer there in the olive orchards. I realised that I knew nothing about life really, wasn't capable of being a writer, and never wrote anything but letters again. It was from there, half a year later, that I mostly hitched to India over 2 months, arriving in MCloud Ganj in October 1975, just after seeing the Taj Mahal in the Dusshera full moon, floating there in the mist, at the hour of the cow dust, in the twilight. I fell deeply in love with India. It was while in that dreamy ecstasy that I think can be experienced by people who are attracted to India's multi-layered, kaleidoscopic chaos, that I stayed at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, managing to live in India for 5 months on 70 dollars. Here, I thought, I would be living near and around genuine Buddhist monks who would teach me something I'd wanted to know about for a decade, how to work on the cessation of suffering. I was willing, able and interested. In my first 5 months in India, there was a Bhutanese 'monk' who attempted to rape me as I walked back to my lodgings in Bodhgaya, where I went on pilgrimage to see the Bodhi tree, and where Sakyamuni was said to have attained enlightenment. As a result, I blamed my long blonde hair as to why this 'monk' was induced to try and rape me. So, after smacking this 'monk' in the face with a resounding crack that left me feeling guilty for years, I escaped from his muscled grip and ran back to the tourist bungalow and cut off most of my hair, and later wore clothes that would be best described as tent-like. Back in the USA, it was with my cut-off hair and in my almost floor length, made in Calcutta, dark brown tent dress that I went to see Sogyal. That was when he assaulted me. After the 4 or so months I knew Sogyal in the USA, anything that smelled like an excuse to abuse people sexually, like so-called Tantric sex and so-called using 'dakinis to get 'energy', and most of the ritual elements of TB, repelled me. Yes, my having been sexually abused as a child and turning to lamas as loving parent figures, who took advantage of that sexually, was very traumatizing. When Geshela asked to see my breasts I tried to write it off as just curiosity, a monk who hadn't seen a white woman's breasts before. I was trying to accept that maybe what I needed was to talk with a teacher who was MARRIED and had a family, a more worldly-wise lama, which prompted me to think in 1980 that Sakya Trizin would be a man to talk with about my feelings of existential aloneness. He had lost his parents when he was a tiny child, and been brought up by an aunt who had recently died. I thought maybe he could understand my own sense of loss, not having a family. Since he had been giving me private teachings on the Dzogchen meditation part of my yidam practice, seeing the unawakened states as the flip side of the same awakened states, I asked him about how it was that lust and compassion were related. He said like water and ice. That water and ice are the same substance in different forms. That seemed so wise to me! Like water and ice! Compassion is the free-flowing aspect of love and lust is its arrested, 'frozen' mode. Ah, how beautiful that seemed. Back I went to the meditation cushion with delight! This added a new dimension to ‘going with the flow’. A week later he said he had a vision of him yab-yum with me as Dorje Phurba. Immediately I felt suspicious, but at the same time somewhat shocked and also flattered that this His Holiness person included me unconsciously or consciously as part of his 'path'. But moments later, as I got up to leave our hourly lesson in meditation, he said he had this vision and wanted me 'do it' with him. I said "You must be joking". He became visibly, audibly angry with me and scowlingly said, "No, I want to come to your room tomorrow morning when I go for my walk and do this." My blood went cold. This lama I had come to trust over the months I'd spent studying with him, thinking I could respectfully share my doubts, worries, meditation questions, needs to understand certain texts. It all seemed to be finally happening, a quiet, simple rapport with a Buddhist teacher. No rituals, no bs, just working on meditation practice. Then, bam, it was in that instant shattered. I didn't listen to my inner voice that wanted to say no. I didn't say no. I said alright but my heart was cold and my stomach sick. What if maybe this was it, the actual transformation of a worldly activity into a yogic practice? Like the Tibetan lamas said in the books and everything! What if I were passing up this possible chance with my teacher because of my fears stemming from being sexually abused in childhood? Maybe this was a chance to transcend that, to let go of the attachment-revulsion pendulum, to alchemize the worldly into the gold of awakened activity? So I said ok. The next morning he came up the steps to my rented apartment across the street from the Sakya property on Rajpur Road. He quickly snuck in, closing the door behind him and came to my bedroom.  He sat on the bed, mumbled something in Tibetan, and told me to think that what we were about to do was for the benefit of all sentient beings  I folded my hands in prayer and prayed, and then he lifted his skirt. Below his large belly, he put on a condom which hung off his acorn like a windsock on a windless day. Wondering what was going to happen next, and if anything could actually take place, I offered him oral sex. I sincerely didn’t think he could actually function sexually. That was when he said he was afraid that oral sex would make me pregnant. He also said that he thought that was unclean. He asked me to lie down, he lay on top of me, grunted in about 5 seconds and then ran for the door, carrying the condom with him, and really I hardly felt anything at all except somewhat numb with remorse. So maybe he wasn't endowed enough to actually have sex except maybe for himself? Maybe this was something that was supposed to be my disciple's gift to him and I should just lump it, get over it with detachment. Maybe I should just laugh at the cosmic ridiculousness and keep on doing my meditation! So I took a deep breath and thought, I'm just not going to think about this, and whatever it is, well that's what it is. But the next time I went for my class, ALL Sakya Trizin could talk about was the sex act. That's it. He seemed highly lascivious, amused, and wanted to do it all again. So I let him do it again. Was this a test? I was attached to feeling remorse? Was this going to cure me of thinking about sex as something important, and help me see the transparent folly of being hurt by sex? Sakya Trizin had told me at the beginning of our meditation classes some weeks prior, to see everything as sacred, that he was to be seen as the yidam, the world as pure, all sounds as mantras, so I focused on that, that this was an 'enlightened' experience. It was my trying to make lemonade out of lemons. Then when I went to study with him, all he could talk about was sex, wanting me to swear that I would always tell him where I was in the world, and be available to him for sex. When his dignified, beautiful wife walked into the room that day, he went into a sort of cold-shouldering me that seemed like he was worried he might have been talking too loudly, and might have gotten caught by her talking about this with me. From then on he whispered to me. It is widely known he married for political reasons: "In order to maintain the tradition of the Khon family lineage, in 1974, H. H. Sakya Trizin married Dagmo Kusho Tashi Lhakyet, the daughter of the Minister of the King of Derge." So I thought maybe his life was compartmentalized: political marriage here, “sang-yum” there, mother over there, and maybe he needed a person with whom to 'do' his yab-yum yidam practice and I was just a handy orifice who was also a dedicated disciple. I was to be used but not somehow included in this process???? I could see I got nothing out of these 2 encounters except confusion, remorse, some shame. But I had faith that he must know what he was doing because after all, he was a Holiness, and everybody held him in high esteem. My doubts must be out of ignorance, selfishness, kleshas. He made me promise not to talk about 'it' with anybody; it would be our secret. When I tried to discuss meditation with him over the next 2 years after I left Rajpur and returned occasionally, he didn't have time. All he DID have time for was wanting to talk about sex. When I went out to the Sakya center once for a wang given by the Dalai Lama there, and another time hoping to continue the actual meditation classes we used to have, he cold-shouldered me. One time he stood holding his wife's hand, which is highly unusual for any Tibetan, and I felt like I was somehow a pariah, had done something wrong, simply by doubting him in the privacy of my mind, my wanting to study meditation instead of just giving into being an orifice for him. I knew over time that our meditation class relationship had vanished and would never return. I went into a 5 month retreat. When I came out of that retreat I house-sat for my old friend when she and her husband were away for a few days. When I returned from the bazaar they had returned, and the woman, who had found my diary, read it, burned it full of holes with a stick of incense without telling me. I discovered the burned pages a day later, asked her why, and her venom was really painful to me, blaming me for endangering His Holiness Sakya Trizin's reputation by writing what I did in my diary! I had told nobody! I had written it in MY diary!!! So now she knew. I felt ashamed, reviled by my old, dear friend, who blamed me for "smiling too much," and THAT was why the married Sakya Trizin had used me like he did; I'd broken the code of secrecy by accident, leaving my diary around for her to pry into, and so I decided to leave Rajpur. When Sakya Trizin came to New Delhi a few months later, he asked to see me, nudge nudge, wink wink, make sure I'm alone so he can do the yab-yum thing again privately in his room. I just couldn't go again. That was the end of my connection with TB, of any trust, any faith. I stopped my practice with fear, regret, sadness, shame, loss, grieving the loss of my sense of community. In the next 4 years I tried to discuss what happened with both a Gelug nun, Jampa Pamo,and a Kargyu nun, Karma Lekshe Tsomo, who I'd known well for years. They both told me to not discuss it but keep it all secret, and if I saw/thought something wrong it was my fault. During that time I had a large apartment in New Delhi, where many guests, old Buddhist friends of mine, stayed when they came to town. We would be having breakfast or dinner on the verandah and out would come their own stories of bad experiences with various Tibetan lamas, which they begged me to keep secret, to "protect the lamas and the dharma". Somehow the revelations of the truth never budged from the level of gossip.  There was no clarity about what was going on or any sense of what direction to take, how to sort this mess out. The code of secrecy had us all paralysed. There was no talking openly, so no clarity of purpose, intention or feeling. Whoever I discussed this Tibetan lack of morality with would invariably say that "THEIR" lama (Kalu Rinpoche, Karmapa, Khamtrul Rinpoche) would NEVER do "such a thing". Then how come these lamas were SURROUNDED by sexual abuse and nothing was done, or it emerged that really their lama DID do such a thing!??? My polite disinterest in the Tibetan culture ended for me when I heard my old 'dharma sister' friend from the Library days had committed suicide by burning herself alive as an offering in a retreat. Then that disinterest turned into outright disgust mixed with horror. This was after it became public knowledge that Geshela had masturbated for years between the legs (common monastic practice as a way of not breaking the FULL vow of celibacy but only committing a 'misdemeanor' by not committing the monk's vow felony of full penetration) of a South American nun he'd ordained. She had stood up in his class at the Library and told the open-jawed room full of 30+ students what Geshela had been doing to her for 2 years. My dear Geshela did THAT!!! And his old disciple had suicided after that???!!! It was too much pain, too sad, too wrong!!! And then Geshela went to New Zealand with that randy twerp of a zhebzhi, Khedrup Tharchin, who always used to feel me up while I did korwa around the Library if I didn't run fast enough away from him???!!!  No responsibility? No punishment for this breaking of vows? WHAT hypocrisy all this was AND THE DALAI LAMA KNEW ABOUT ALL THIS AND DID NOTHING?????!!!! My faith shattered. The sense of samaya anything snapped. I went to Delhi and got a job in the fashion clothing business because of my facility with Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu, which are all linguistically intertwined in colloquial Hindustani. Yes, after that, any adoration of tormas, dakni anything, yab-yum anything ... it made me feel sick. I got to know the Tibetans in New Delhi over the next 4 years, the more worldly ones, and understood their deep contempt for all the foreign 'injis' who came East to worship the lamas. The young, non-monk, non-Dalai Lama Administration Tibetans really know almost nothing about their culture, history, and philosophy. All this bowing and scraping to lamas for anything other than "blessings", or in a medical emergency, or to appear traditional, is nuts to them. The Tibetans who were born in India, or who came over as little kids from Tibet in 1959, they grew to love India as an expression of Bollywood. Their cultural frame of reference is the amazingly kitch, bizarre, New Indian culture, with Amitabh Bachan (India's answer to Arnold) as a culture hero. These Tibetans never got to know under-the-surface India, like an Indian kid would. All the New Tibetans know about India is the thin veneer of the commercial pop drek. It would be like somebody coming to America from Tibet and thinking that Dallas and Dynasty TV shows from the 1980's are documentaries, really ARE the REAL America and dressing like that, talking like that. So the New Tibetans have this strange culture that came out of Bollywood, which came out of Hollywood. The lamas to this new generation are about as real and meaningful as Santa Claus. There is incredible contempt for Westerners among the Tibetans. They don't like anybody who isn't Tibetan, although with the New Tibetan kids, I did see admiration for New Taiwanese kids because there was a sense of similar features and similar materialism. Before leaving Clement Town and going to live in Rajpur, I went sweater vending several times with my neighbors in Clement Town just for fun. Because I speak both Tibetan and Hindi I sat with them observing their business transactions. The Tibetans would say in Hindi as they held up the wool sweaters that were sent by Americans to India as part of the charity to Bangladesh, "This is the best, most pure," and in Tibetan they would say "shit" or "straw". The Indians thought the Tibetans were saying "wool" in Tibetan because almost no Indians speak any Tibetan, but almost all Tibetans living in India speak some Hindi. The Tibetan business traders were all making fun of their Indian customers in this devious, nasty, contemptuous way. All done with a smiling face! There was this mask of friendliness and warmth and then the reality of ridicule and seething anger underneath. That was shocking to me. This was not a one off experience, this was one in a thousand such experiences with Tibetans over a ten year period. The next 4 years, from 1981 to the end of 1985, I lived and worked in Delhi and knew many working Tibetans there from all over the subcontinent: from the South, from Darjeeling, from Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Dharamsala, Manali ... and there was this ongoing contempt for Westerners' adoration of the lamas, of Westerners period, who were denigrated as hippies if they didn't look like John Travolta and his dancing partner in Saturday Night Fever, which is what the young Tibetan kids aspired to, and if a Westerner did dress well they were spoken about as whores or somebody to try and get as a "sponsor". This contempt for Westerners and no curiosity about Western culture in any way, was echoed by many lamas I spoke with, like the administrator ‘rinpoches’ at the New Delhi Tibet Center. At the same time, young Tibetans who lusted after polyester pants a la Travolta, were somewhat horrified when Westerners were interested in wearing yak herder boots! LOL! So ... all this mess over a decade added up to a deep distaste for Tibetan anything, thankas, cultural symbols. How could I feel comfortable around people who have so much contempt for everybody else, while they kept their hand out for everybody else's money and real estate, and adoration? These people EXPECTED to be worshipped, pitied, pampered, cared about, paid for, idolized, when they were just greedy takers, who sneered at those who gave to them! So, if you talk about "Dakini Day" with some sort of reverence, and think it's just because the lamas betrayed my trust due to having been sexually abused as a kid, and that's why it isn't something I like or value, no, I learned on MANY levels over 30 years not to like Tibetan culture. To me, you had a feminist get-together in a kind of New Age ceremony. That kind of thing's not my cup of tea really. I really don't like anything spiritual in any kind of group. Something catalytically happens in a group which just doesn’t feel healthy to me as part of my sense of the 'spiritual', whatever that is. If a bunch of women want to get together to grok the cosmic nature of the universe, or have a sort of ceremony, okay, I wish you enjoyment. But to call it "Dakini Day" isn't something I like.  It makes me feel uncomfortable to talk with you about it because it is something that IS meaningful to you. That's your thing. What pleases me is privately connecting with what I think of as a "truth path", which has been formed in part from my studies of Buddhist teachings I received in person and studied further in private, as well as 17 years studying Western psychology. That truth path also means for me enjoying conversation, art, walking, being in nature quietly, studying science, reading, occasional meditation, resting my mind in a loving awareness that is democratic, non-theistic, part American, part Buddhist, and when I can remember to do so, being in the moment, feeling deeply connected with the universe. Phew. All this came pouring out this afternoon. I didn't expect to go on such a long ramble. It feels healing to get all the gory details out, to speak about this really and also start to think about what I think is the baby not to be thrown out with the bath water. For me the whole Dakini thing was flushed down the toilet. It’s not even in the bathwater, LOL! What is the bathwater to me is Tibetan culture. If I've bored the daylights out of you Tiger Lily or anybody else here with my verbosity, my apologies, this has been a sort of purging, getting it out in words, healing for me. all the best, AmLearning