Amid War, a Voice for Inner Peace

Gehlek Rimpoche is no stranger to anger. In 1959, when he was 12, his privileged life as a lama-in-training was cruelly shattered. Without a chance to say goodbye to his parents, this grandnephew of the 13th Dalai Lama fled his Tibetan homeland with planes strafing overhead--forced into exile by the occupying Communist Chinese militia. After weeks of near-starvation on the Himalayan trek, he reached India, where, instead of a palace, a refugee camp would be his new home.

Both his parents died at the hands of the Chinese occupiers. His mother was imprisoned and tortured. “My mother was virtually beaten to death. She was released, and three days later she died. All her bones were broken,” Rimpoche says soberly. “So--this feeling of anger is there. I try to work it out. There’s no reason why I have to get angry against Chinese people. Chinese people are beautiful people. They suffered, too, under this particular chairman’s leadership. But I have this anger against the Communist leaders.”

At his editor’s home in San Francisco, Rimpoche answers the door himself, wearing a drab sports jacket and a rumpled shirt. He offers a warm handshake. He’s a stocky, broad-shouldered man devoid of pomp, with a ready grin and an alert way of listening. His straight talk is infused with humor.

Now a U.S. citizen, Nawang Gehlek Rimpoche (Rimpoche, pronounced “RIM-po-shay,” is an honorific meaning “Precious One”) is one of the last lamas to be fully educated in Tibet. Los Angeles and San Francisco are the last stops on his national tour for his book “Good Life, Good Death: Tibetan Wisdom on Reincarnation” (Riverhead), published just two weeks after the Sept. 11 tragedy.

“My motivation in writing the book was to ease everyday suffering,” Rimpoche explains. He had no idea that the scale of “everyday suffering” would be so drastically amplified by September’s events. Nevertheless, by the time he set out on his speaking tour, he was committed to helping salve the wound in the national psyche.

For his book, Rimpoche draws on his experience as a Tibetan exile, as well as insights gained over 21/2 millenniums of Buddhist tradition, to discuss what he calls “the opportunity that is always before us to change the course of our journey in both life and death.” The book is a bare-bones distillation of Rimpoche’s thoughts on what makes a good life, which he defines as “a life of honesty, caring, compassion, kindness and treating everybody with respect. A life that is not controlled by ego, jealousy, fear, hatred and anger.”

Rimpoche has worked on his anger toward the Communist leadership in China for years. “I thought I was not doing so bad,” he says with a rueful chuckle. Then, five years ago, he had the opportunity to go to Beijing. “I was in Singapore, where our plane laid over. It was after midnight and there was only one bank open in the airport. I had to change some money. They gave me these coins with Chairman Mao’s head on them. Looking at them, I hurt so bad.

“I went back and tried to change them. ‘Do you have any other coins?’ ‘No,’ the woman said. I went back again: ‘Don’t you have anything else?’ ‘What’s the matter with you?’ She really thought I was crazy.” He had no alternative but to put the coins in his pocket: “They really gave me the creeps.”

Anger, he writes in his book, “is the mind that wishes to harm and hurt.” He also speaks of the expense of anger. Like fire, it consumes a lot of fuel.

Immediately after the World Trade Center attacks, with the entire country angry, Rimpoche--who teaches and lectures from coast to coast--received hundreds of e-mails and phone calls asking for his guidance. Yet before he could offer advice, he had to navigate through his own emotional response to the tragedy.

“The night of Sept. 11, I was watching CNN and they reported an explosion in Kabul. And I said, ‘Oh good! Get that Osama bin Laden! Catch him and kill him! Don’t let him kill so many innocent people!’ Oh! There’s my anger again! This book was about to come out, and I talk a lot about anger and how to take care of anger ... and then--here I am stuck with it. That’s not right.” So Rimpoche decided to sit down and observe his anger toward the perpetrators. (“It’s almost like meditating--this thinking about it,” he explained.)

“I realized immediately that my mind was reaching for the mind of those hijackers. And the relevant question arises immediately: What are these people? What are they thinking? Why did they do all this? Where are they coming from? Then I realized that I don’t care where they’re coming from. But what are they thinking .... Eventually I sensed a tremendous fear in their minds. Unbearable fear. When they released the cockpit recordings, you could hear the anger and fear in their voices.”

He pondered the fact that these were educated people, trained pilots. “What happened to their education? What happened to all the learning they did all their life? They were completely twisted, brainwashed. Not only did they kill thousands of people and cause suffering for millions--but they destroyed the most precious thing they had--their own lives.”

Can he feel compassion toward them? “Definitely!” he replies without hesitation. “If they are not a subject of compassion, where else can you find it? We can develop compassion for people who are wounded and bleeding. And that is because we can really see the blood. But if you look at these people--the hijackers--not only what they did was so horrible, but what was inside them was horrible.

“The act of compassion protects us. It prevents us from developing hatred. We all have anger after Sept. 11. As a Buddhist I shouldn’t say it’s good. But it’s only natural. We all have it. But it’s important to make sure that it doesn’t become hatred. Because if it becomes hatred, we are no different from those who crashed their airplanes into the towers.”

But compassion does not have to be passive. “Compassion does not have to be doormat!” he says in a phrase that elicits a quizzical expression from his interviewer. “You can also stop aggression through compassion. We have to go after Bin Laden, get him, and get done with it. We do this through compassion--to save him from himself as well as to prevent him from harming others. People think compassion means not to hurt a fly. Sure, it’s true you shouldn’t hurt a fly--provided the fly does not kill human beings.”

Today Gehlek Rimpoche is considered one of the most revered and accessible teachers of Buddhism in the West. He was groomed for that role by His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself, who, soon after Rimpoche arrived in India as a refugee, selected him along with 16 other monks to complete their studies with him and two of his own tutors. Rimpoche’s facility in learning English was noticed and nurtured, and in 1964, he attended Cornell University on a special program. He was tempted to stay in the States, but returned to India to assist the Dalai Lama in setting up Tibet House, an organization dedicated to preserving Tibetan culture and religion.

After his return to India, he suffered a crisis of doubt--about his spiritual practice and the idea of reincarnation in particular. Tibetans believe that every consciousness that already exists will always exist. In pre-Communist Tibet, there developed a system for recognizing certain beings, known as incarnate lamas, who keep coming back for a specific purpose. Rimpoche himself was “recognized” at age 4 as the reincarnation of the abbot of a famous monastery. (“In old Tibetan society,” Rimpoche commented, “they accept reincarnation just like Americans accept hamburger. You never ask questions about hamburger. If you did, they would probably think you were nuts.”) In the midst of his crisis, “I tried everything,” he says, “smoking, drinking, sex, looking for some kind of kick that I thought I couldn’t get from dharma [Buddhist teaching].”

Gradually, through a long process of meditation and practice, Rimpoche came back to his spiritual practice and as well to “some kind of firm and unshakable belief in reincarnation.” In his book, he doesn’t try to convince Americans about reincarnation but simply asks the reader to “entertain the idea for a moment ... to see how it changes your perspective on your life and your death.”

In the 1980s, Rimpoche returned to the United States and in 1988, he founded Jewel Heart, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan culture and Buddhism. Jewel Heart, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., has chapters in many American cities, as well as the Netherlands, Malaysia and Singapore. Rimpoche’s teachings have attracted students all over the world, among them a number of noted artists, including composer Philip Glass and the late poet Allen Ginsberg, whose poem, “Do the Meditation Rock,” forms one of the chapters of Rimpoche’s book.

Rimpoche cites Ginsberg’s as an example of what constitutes a “good death.” After Ginsberg was diagnosed with a terminal illness, “he started celebrating his life and the fact that it was coming to an end. Compassion was the principle of his life, without his using the word compassion, and all of his life was totally dedicated to positive causes.”

Rimpoche believes that preparation for death can help anyone, regardless of religion or belief. As he writes in his book, “Instead of running away from the thought of death, we have a better chance of doing something for ourselves if we take a look at what’s coming or at least try to imagine it. Not only will this help reduce our fear, it will lay the groundwork for us to take advantage of the opportunity to transform the dying process into a process of enlightenment. And if we can’t accomplish that, at least we can have a better death.”

From the time the word went out that Ginsberg was near death, he was surrounded by family, friends, lovers, poets, musicians and fellow Buddhists in his New York loft. In his obituary of Ginsberg for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, the writer Stokes Howell describes the scene vividly: “In the center of the loft, Gehlek Rimpoche and a group of Tibetan monks chanted prayers and rang bells to give Allen the last support possible. In chairs around the bed, his ‘guests’ took turns sitting, watching him, holding his hand, saying goodbye.” People arrived and left, talking, reading poetry, eating Chinese takeout. Howell quotes Rimpoche saying: “At the time of death there was no negativity.”

In the book, Rimpoche writes of the depth of his connection to Allen Ginsberg. If the Tibetan lama taught Ginsberg about Buddhism, the Beat writer and political activist taught Rimpoche about poetry, and about life as well.

“Once Allen gave a workshop called ‘Spontaneous Poetry,’ and he insisted I come. He asked people, ‘What are you thinking? Say it now.’ He asked everybody and I kept my mouth shut. Then he turned to me and said, ‘Rimpoche, what are you thinking?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to end up in the shoes of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.’ They were spiritual teachers involved in a big scandal at the time. He said, ‘The way not to fall into that trap is to make sure you keep nothing hidden in any closet. No matter what it is, don’t hide it. Keep everything out in the open.’ I followed his advice, which was really great. Allen himself had an open life and an open death....He was totally and completely himself, and he showed me how comfortable I could be in my own skin.”

Rimpoche’s cell phone rings. He apologizes. It’s a member of his Jewel Heart community in Ann Arbor, calling for counseling on a personal matter. He takes the call. As he talks, I recall his description of leaving Tibet for India and his new life. “It was as if a helicopter picked me up in the 19th century and deposited me in the 20th.” Here he is, a reincarnated lama in a sports jacket with a cell phone to his ear, comfortable in his own skin, time and place.