Ultimate self-control

The Tenga Rinpoche who passed out of his pain-wracked body about 10 days ago was an extremely modest human being. My German Dharma sister Barbara said she'd met him only once yet never forgot because she thought she was just talking to a friendly monk while he was up on a ladder changing light bulbs, but before long somebody else came into the room and started prostrating, indicating the man on the ladder was master of that monastery.

I only met him once myself: when my teacher's attendant inexplicably took me with him to that modest monastery on private business for our precious teacher Thrangu Rinpoche. He is Tenga's last remaining Dharma brother and peer trained in old Tibet. The maroon robed monk and I were alone with Rinpoche in his private quarters--a combination bedroom/meditation room or as the English would say: a bed/sitter-- maybe 20 minutes, the ailing, frail and almost blind, one-eyed Tenga reclining in the white sheets of his bed. I sat politely in a chair pulled up to it, having no idea what was going on in the Tibetan language exchange, but before it was over, Rinpoche turned and very warmly asked about me. Then he pulled from his side table a small gift.

The photos and eyewitness reports of Tenga Rinpoche's demise generously posted on the internet--thank you, attending monks-- seemed to have been another gift. Barbara and I discovered over the phone how profoundly we were both haunted by his passing, how something in our souls had shifted. And he hadn't really been our teacher... at least until this moment. His last moment.

According to accounts I've read, Rinpoche had been in a hospital in Kathmandu, in so much pain he had to be turned every few minutes. He'd already lost an eye, a foot and most recently a leg to diabetes. He was having trouble breathing. Nonetheless, he was able at a specific moment of his own choosing, to tell the attending doctors to discharge him; he needed to go back to his monastery right away. A furor erupted between the medical men and the monks over the inevitable consequences. But you don't tell a Rinpoche when he is going to die: he tells you. So the monks took him back to Benchen Monastery in Syambu, to that bed/sitter where I first met him.

Tenga Rinpoche now showed no sign of pain, or any discomfort at all. The person in the hospital had vanished. With unwavering resolve, the person between the white sheets of that bed/sitter dictated orders for prayers, requests to see certain people and plans for his cremation ceremony. By all accounts, Rinpoche was as meticulous with detail as he had been decades earlier serving as the ritual master for HH Karmapa at Rumtek, Sikkim monastery.

Without complaint about anything, Rinpoche politely waited for the invited to appear. He passed the time dictating a litany of thank yous, name by name, to those who had contributed over the years to his monasteries and teachings. Finally, when the last person on his must-see list came and went, he let go of his breath. The day on the Tibetan calendar happened to be the one most sacred to the great savior of beings, White Tara. Westerners have always circulated sotto voce rumors that Tenga Rinpoche was her living emanation and now he confirmed them.

For the next four days, Rinpoche sat in what Tibetan's call thugdam. His body was technically dead but his mind very much alive and focused within it. This proof of the mind being indestructible is described sometimes as deathless death, or profound meditation. It is the highest sign of advance practice and realization, but you can never know who has achieved it until they pass into this deathless death. All those tantalizing stories about this otherworldly magic of old Tibet were now shown to have been true. Seeing a photo of Tenga Rinpoche frozen in perfect meditation posture with no sign of the deterioration of a normal corpse was believing.

Two days ago word came that Rinpoche had finally departed his earthly body. How did those around him know? Shock and awe. In the middle of a sunny afternoon, the sky over Syambu quite suddenly turned unnaturally dark. There was an extraordinary zap of lightening over the monastery itself, a loud crash of thunder and an intense but brief downpour of hard rain. It was over in a minute but for the rainbows. And this: at the exact same time the exact same weather, rainbows and all, struck the sky over Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim. "It was," his faithful attendant blogged, "as though Rinpoche was being welcomed home by all the bodhisattvas and dakinis."

Now his brocade clad body sits in the Tara Shrine Room above his bedroom in his old monastery. People pass by for blessings and will continue to do so for another five weeks. On May 18, the 49th day after his passing, that one-eyed, one-legged, one-handed body will be cremated with a ceremony that will be anything but modest.

All traces of this particular Tenga Rinpoche will then be gone. The physical ones, I mean. It's said again and again in all the texts, an authentic teacher is the only one who can show you the way to liberation, lighting the path with their own experience. And a teacher is authentic only if they can give you just the teaching you need to believe that. Deathless mind is definitely one of them, best illustrated by how an authentic teaching comes alive in yours--the way a fresh candle is lit from a dying flame.

Thank you, Tenga Rinpoche. Please come back soon.

You can learn more about this and see the photos at the Benchen Monastery website.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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