ONE TASTE PRACTICE

Rinpoche came again to Maine this summer, so the annual retreat was back on, if only for five days. Except for new and very exciting teaching material, it was the same old same old: same place, same faces, same solemn atmosphere and disgusting food. The same sangha that has organized it for a dozen years ran it with the same tightfistedness that squeezes out spontaneous little joys and sends people to the periphery to smile in secret.

The spirit behind that sangha is an excruciatingly thin man whose absolute sincerity shutters this retreat in silence. He never stops exhorting attendees to restrain themselves and refrain from speaking until specified times-- which he thinks are too long. His sincerity also encourages him to keep talking during the silent meditation hour, speaking up to tell those on the cushion what to think, how to view and where to sit. Many of the silenced find his perpetual interruptions, his evident fondness for monopolizing the mike, as annoying as the interminable program-postponing pitches of the infamous fundraising drives on NPR.

Several years ago, one Boston Brahmin chafed by the inflexibility of this man and his regime said that all he needed were sideburns and a hat to look like a perfect Puritan preacher. He was puritanical, fundamentalist enough be the incarnation of Cotton Mather. She referred to his chillingly cold wife as Carrie Nation.

Oddly enough, their sangha was said this year to be studying Mind Beyond Death by the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. This is a book that very emphatically starts by relaying an important message from the lineage: no two people practice Dharma the same way. Everyone drives the vehicle their own way because there is no one correct and only method of achievement. This echoes the Buddha who is said to have taught 84,000 dharmas because that is the number of variations in the way human beings can learn, and he wanted to reach everyone on their own terms. That is in fact supposedly the telltale sign of a Bodhisattva: the ability to tailor teaching to fit every individual student.

For many people, individuality is the joy of Buddhadharma. It is not, thank God, an organized religion. At least not as monotheists of the Western world know it. But it seems to be necessary for some former monotheists of the West, perhaps merely out of habit, to organize Dharma into recognizable church group activity. Thus the rigid twelve-step programs and exclusive catholic hierarchy of Shambhala, which this particular group leader was once a lowly part of.

Perhaps because Trungpa Rinpoche’s step-by-step Shambhala path came first to break ground in America, it continues to be mimicked as the right way, the only way. And many practitioners continue to rebel against such rigid organizing to go their own way, often into more flexible, and authentically Tibetan, sanghas as ours is supposed to be.

But sadly, very sadly in dismay, I am writing to say suffering exists because it is not. What I learned on the sidelines from people who could not keep silent was how many had of necessity left this particular sangha to pursue their valued dharma practice without negative interference. The number of abdicators went as high as eight. Also some who had not towed the line and adhered to rules had been thrown out—as unceremoniously as the moneychangers in the Temple. Nobody dared breathe any of this to Rinpoche, especially after they had been suddenly quite cordially invited to show up for a sangha photo op, making the group look for Rinpoche far larger and happier than it is.

Truth hiding behind appearance is what Buddhadharma is all about, isn't it?

I would like to suggest a solution to this sad situation, something to illuminate the enlightenment path. But I can only say two different women lamented in confidence that they didn’t know why their particular energy offended leaders of this pack so obviously that they were made to feel unwelcome in it—because I happen to be very familiar with the circumstance. Once upon a time, I was running the kitchen for this retreat, overseeing the care and feeding of Rinpoche. Then presto chango! without explanation I was persona non grata—because, I discovered, I was not solemnly silent and constrained enough while tending to Rinpoche’s needs to fit the resident concept of “religious.” I spent too much time in the kitchen, not enough on the cushion. Rinpoche’s satisfaction was not their point.

Attending this retreat has consequently been unnerving, and getting rudely ignored at times outright upsetting. But the teachings are worth fighting for and this year I promised myself I would learn the practice of One Taste: keeping equilibrium without distinguishing good or bad. I would just focus on what Rinpoche had to say. I would en-lighten myself by shedding all worries about anything or anybody else and smile in the blessing of being responsible for nothing but showing up to learn some Dharma. I would dedicate any merit to my late Dharma sister Joan who I was really missing.

I was getting better at letting go, feeling more confident about how much none of this stuff really mattered anyway and actually starting to enjoy having nothing else to do, when one of Rinpoche’s monks called my cell phone. When I asked, as I habitually do, if there was anything he or any of his cohorts needed, he paused, leaving lots of empty silence, and then almost in a whisper, he said: “food.” That’s how I discovered the monks were going hungry because the leader of the pack, having no real interest in food himself, hadn’t been thoughtful or generous enough to consider their needs might be different.

As soon as the afternoon teaching session ended, I took off for the supermarket. I was my old self born again. I ran home and slammed pots and chopped with fury, a woman on a mission to make Tibetan food to put a treat in the retreat. Under cover of darkness I delivered a whole mess of dishes to the secret place where Rinpoche was being stowed. “Very happy,” the monk whispered the next day when I passed by outside the shrine room. “Everybody now very happy.”

Well, not everybody. I later learned that finding my food in the kitchen the next day incited such a tantrum in the sangha leader's wife, she chafed one of the monks as badly as her husband had that Boston Brahmin. An argument was going on when another monk came to the rescue. “Sandy Garson brought that food,” he said, “because she requested teachings and Sandy Garson understands Tibetan people and their culture. She knows you make an offering for a teaching, something pleasing to the teacher, and she knows this food pleases Tibetan people.”

None of this surfaced on the face of the retreat. Rinpoche taught with the same smiling equanimity the days he had to eat paltry helpings of soup and the day he got to eat beef ribs and emadhase. The monks performed their tasks with consistent grace and no sign of verbal bruising. The leaders kept on as though everything was under tight control. And I kept focusing on just the teachings, not worrying what Rinpoche and the monks were going to eat because it was not my assignment. Rinpoche was showing such mastery of One Taste, I wanted very much to do that too.

Truth hiding behind appearance is what Buddhadharma is all about. And so it was at this retreat.

I dedicate it all to the memory of Joan.





~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

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