Bummed Out

Somehow I got into one of these times that try the soul. Next week, or close to it, will mark 27 years since I, as they powers that be like to say, entered the door/gate of Dharma, and when I heard about a special weekend retreat in that stage-set of a town, Carmel-by-the Sea, I thought it would be the perfect anniversary celebration. Kind of like when I discovered Dharma that frigid January night in a room over the only Ben & Jerry's store outside Vermont. Double nirvana.

The retreat master of ceremonies was to be the current hot rockstar of Tibetan style meditation, Anam Thupten, called rinpoche. He is young, handsome, trim fit and fluent in English. He has a center in the East Bay but has mostly been turning up everywhere else, even in Maine where he now does an annual week-long retreat. That alone seemed such an auspicious connection, I wanted to check him out. So I paid a hefty fee for my anniversary present. I also paid for a hotel room during a holiday weekend.  I organized my schedule to make this all work, including the 3-hour drive to Carmel. 

I of course have my own precious teacher to whom I am proudly devoted, but Rinpoche is 81 now. He's had a stroke and a knee replacement. He has to watch out for diabetes and high blood pressure. So this was not double dipping, not disloyalty, just prudence. I have been investigating future options, to at least know who is out there to tow me through the void that will inevitably come. I have been doing this for some time now, but my diligence was rewarded with emptiness. The dynamic young Rinpoche I found ideal abruptly abdicated the debilitating and distracting international demands of being a rockstar rinpoche and vanished. He left a note saying he wanted to practice pure Dharma, so he was going to be a cave-dwelling yogi roaming the Himalayas.

Much has been written by the masters and drilled into us about selecting a genuine teacher. You can't be too careful; you are putting your life in their hands. So you need to put them to the test, listening to the way they teach, sensing a karmic connection, and confirming the authenticity of what they say. It's hard work. I was teacher shopping for about six years until it occurred to me, without doubt, that Rinpoche was the one. But it took hearing one lama's one same answer to every question: "Buy my book", and sitting for two years in a crowd being mercilessly screamed at and abused, being crushed by rampant self-serving hierarchy, ignored by misogynists,  plus personal feelings of don't go there, to get it about Rinpoche who, by the way, I once rejected as too gracious, elderly and Tibetan.

The opening night of this weekend retreat was advertised as a "public talk."  That means the Carmelites were welcome to come tune in to a very general explanation of meditation or the story of Tibetan Buddhism--or at least that's usually the function of a public talk.  Following instructions, I got there early to get a seat--the room was set up mostly with folding chairs--not meditation cushions. Most everybody else piled in at the last minute, nobody looking like the Carmel public. Hardcore Dharma groupies can be distinctly detected by their gaunt scruffiness and the 100 or so there did not make a liar out of me.

Anam Thupten was astonishingly prompt. At precisely 7:00PM he walked up the center aisle and sat on a simple, wide maroon-colored cushion.  He was not wearing monks robes or anything that might resemble Tibetan garb. His pants were white flimsy Chinese style pull-ons and his maroon shirt Mao style. There was no prostrating, not even head-bending as he passed--all the ritual respect I've been trained to show the Dharma. 

All Rinpoches have their favorite launch pad: mine has us recite a lengthy lineage prayer that asks all those who came before to bless us now in what we are doing. Others have you recite the full refuge and Bodhisattva vows or pray to Manjushri, forever young god of wisdom. This night we simply recited the original Sanskrit for: I take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Anam Thupten smiled a lot. It's good he has such perfect teeth. He smiled and sat stone still on his maroon cushion, trying to look beatific. Sometimes very softly between the smiles, he said something. Most of it made no sense and all those smiles made the words sound giddy. But the adoring crowd was  hanging on every utterance, at least until 7:40 when he really really smiled and said something like: Now go celebrate joy. Talk to each other. Enjoy each other's company. Sounded like the old Maharishi who used to say "Go and do it, love one another." Nobody dedicated the merit, which made me wonder if there had been any.

The same unmanicured faces and outfits, just more of them showed up this morning for the private retreat. Again it began precisely as advertised, at 10. Again in the same outfit, Anam Thubten walked down the aisle, nobody prostrated. Everybody said those three Sanskrit lines of refuge. Then the smiling got underway, and the silence. A few unmemorable words were uttered, in the soft soothing tone of a kindergarten teacher. The subtle salesman's giddiness was still there.

We were told to meditate with eyes closed--something every respected Rinpoche I ever heard says: do not do. There was some very soft spoken guidance for the meditation about realizing your awareness, about finding joy in every breath, about cultivating love.  I could not imagine what text that Facebook post came from. In my experience, Rinpoches always make telling you what text they are quoting and its entire history a big deal; it's the authenticity thing. a guarantee of continuing purity of the teaching lineage, and it's the fear of pollution that keeps them teaching only from texts by the masters and stubbornly insisting on reciting the whole lineage of how this text was handed down from lama a to guru b to rinpoche c and now to you. 

That was pretty much the morning, 2 hours and 20 minutes of Eckart Tolle with endless smiles and three tea/toilet breaks. To be honest,  I did not sit there meditating with my eyes closed: I didn't want to give my 81-year-old teacher with omniscience apoplexy. I did not find joy having to pay all that money and drive all that way to hear that I had awareness after I've been studying its finer points for the past 26 years.  I did not have a positive feeling about anything happening in that space. I had such a strange sense of con, I wanted to get out of there.

Naturally I did the only thing a self-respecting teacher shopper can do. I Googled Anam Thupten to find out more about him. Seems you can't. You just get the same Facebook profile repeated on every site:  born in Tibet (never says where), wanted to study Buddhism (never says at what monasteries), never says what lineage he was supposedly trained in, who was his great master or how he became a rinpoche. Or where he got that perfect English.Talk about emptiness! All the back-up facts are missing. The basic Tweet is that he wanted to modernize Buddhism for the West. 

And he did seem to be going at that in Carmel, the American way: spooning people the feel good they want to hear. Dharma without its protective rituals or conclusive texts. Just spongy touch feely simplicity. I can't help it. After 27 years of having the genuine Dharma drilled into me, after sitting at the feet of at least a dozen extraordinary teachers, I feel bad about that. And I feel even worse that I do. After 27 years of practicing awareness, what if I still don't have a shred of it?