(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - So it's lovely to still be here. And to come and talk to you today, now I don't know whether Vadricato was poorly briefed or where the eye was, but I was not aware that you were expecting me to talk about the life of Dada Rinpoche. I was just asked, I think Vamodara, I can't, I remember, I think asked me to just say to talk about Dada Rinpoche. And what I thought I'd do is just talk fairly generally about my encounter with him. So I'm not going to explain his life story. There is a lot of material that you can get hold of to find out about that sort of thing. So yeah, I was just asked to talk about my encounter with Dada Rinpoche. And if you think about it, that encounter took place 19 years ago. Pretty much to the day I worked it out. It must be about 19 years ago today that I met him. And in those days, you're only allowed to spend 48 hours in Calimpong. There were certain restrictions. So I met this man over the course of 48 hours, 19 years ago, and here I am, giving a talk about it. And it says something about Dada Rinpoche, and it says something about his school that I can, that that meeting was so vivid. And he made such an impression on me. And the meeting, I suppose, was so important for me that 19 years later, it is still important, and it is still vivid enough for me to, I hope, communicate something of what that meeting was about for me. And when I met Dada, he was a mythic figure. Hardly anybody in the FWBO had met him. Locomitra and Surata had been. A few more, I certainly wasn't the next after them. A handful of people had met Dada Rinpoche. But really, he was still very much a mythic figure from this mythic place, Calimpong, that Banti would talk about in his lectures or in his question and answer sessions. Something kind of from a land far away and long ago. He came from Tibet, which had its own mystique, its own cache. He was a turku, an incarnate llama. Something which, for a start, I hardly understood, except by virtue of having read a very interesting account of the turku tradition in Govindas, the way of the white clouds. He was the man who Banti, in a seminar I had attended, had declared that if there was anybody he'd met who he could believe was a Bodhisattva, it was Dada Rinpoche. And it was for that reason that Banti had taken his own Bodhisattva ordination from Dada Rinpoche because he could actually believe that Dada Rinpoche was a Bodhisattva. So I mean, here were these factors piling up in my mind that I was about to meet somebody who had this very important place in Banti's life, who came from the magical land of Tibet who was an incarnate llama and a Bodhisattva. I was a bit apprehensive about it. Not least because Lokamitra, when talking about his meeting with Dada Rinpoche, which had taken place a couple of years earlier, maybe even three or four years earlier, had told a few of us that he'd felt quite nervous before meeting Rinpoche. He'd known that what you should do when you meet a Rinpoche is a full prostration. And he'd spent the whole time going there, worrying whether or not he could make a full prostration, whether he had it in him to do a thing like that, but that when he'd met Dada Rinpoche, it had just happened. He'd suddenly found himself on the floor. And this made me panic even more because I was absolutely certain that I was not the kind of person who was going to do that. And indeed, I proved not to be. But there were these elements sort of piling up. I was excited about the idea of meeting Dada Rinpoche, but I was also apprehensive, a little nervous of it. And I imagine, if I'm honest, I kind of hid behind the fact that, well, it was only two days, I was there for other reasons. I'd just spent two months traveling around Maharashtra and up into Uttar Pradesh with Banti on his lecture tour that I wrote about in Jai Bin. So I was already in the middle of a pretty exciting time, and this was just two days. And I was going to hide behind the fact that I'd interview him, and I'd do films, and I needn't feel too worried and nervous about the effect that he might have on me. I mean, another thing that doesn't help when you go and meet Dada Rinpoche or when you went to meet him was the sheer business of getting there. You had to go to Calcutta to get permission to, you had to get permission in Calcutta to go to Dajiling. And in Dajiling, you had to get permission to go to Kalimpong. The journey involved trains buses, jeeps, rickshaws. And you would finally arrive in Kalimpong. And Kalimpong, this magical place I'd heard about from Bante's lectures, turned out to be a kind of sprawling ramshackle place. It was spread out over a couple of low hills and across the saddle in between. Much bigger than I'd expected. And it was a place that had obviously known a certain grandeur, even a certain glory. And it had, as you've probably read, once been an important town on the trade route between Tibet and India. But those days were gone with the Chinese invasion. And Kalimpong was sort of stuck out in this cul-de-sac and gradually crumbling away. But a lively bustling place with what I thought was a very pleasant climate. The plains in India, even at that time of year, were hot, they were hot to me. Darjeeling at that time of the year could get pretty cold. And Kalimpong seemed to have this extremely pleasant Mediterranean sort of climate. And a very, very Tibetan feel. I mean, most of the people you saw on the streets were Tibetan, possibly Napoli. You know, getting on with life a busy bizarre, busy crowded streets. But everything crumbling. A lot of graffiti, a lot of long live the Dalai Lama, graffiti, and so on. And this old ramshackle town. And my job was to find the ITBCI school. I'd written to tell them I was coming, but I wasn't expecting to be met. I just assumed, I don't know quite why, that I would just find the place. I think I'd thought that Kalimpong was a tiny little town, a little hamlet, and it would be obvious. But one of the first things I noticed when I got off the Jeep in Kalimpong was that there were school children everywhere. 'Cause it must have been some time of day when kids were going to school or something or coming back. I think it was lunchtime when I arrived. And there were so many school uniforms. Kalimpong, like Darjeeling, seemed to be crammed full of schools. So I thought, oh dear, how am I gonna do this? And it didn't really help to go up to people and say, excuse me, where's the ITBCI school? 'Cause I'd had bad enough time the night, straight after I got off the Jeep, buying a barfi. I'd been into a chai stall, and there was this counter full of these little square suites called Barfi. And I'd ask for some tea, and I'd say, "Barfi." And he said, "What?" I said, "Barfi." And he said, "What?" (audience laughing) And I said, "Barfi, I was just trying." He was just, "Everyone gathered round." (audience laughing) And I said, "Barfi, beefy, beefy, beefy." (audience laughing) And in the end, someone said, "Oh, barfi." (audience laughing) To this day, I don't know what I was doing wrong. (audience laughing) Maybe Tasia Dushing can help me afterwards. (audience laughing) Having had that kind of trouble getting a barfi, I thought, "How am I gonna find the ITBCI school?" (audience laughing) But strange to relate, it wasn't as hard as I expected, because looking at all these kids everywhere on the streets, there were some kids wearing a uniform that was kind of quite nice to look at. They were navy blue sort of skirts or trousers, and orangey yellow shirts. But the thing about those kids was that they just seemed incredibly bright and cheerful, and I just had an instant intuition that they were the ones. So I just walked up to a couple of these kids who were walking on the street and said, "Dada Rinpoche." And they immediately started laughing and took hold of my hand, and off we went. (audience laughing) Yeah, it was possible in others to, it was literally possible to feel his influence, you know, from a mile away, just by the smile on the face of the children who he spent his time with. There was something quite exceptional, just happy, free, alive and alert about those kids. You know, we're talking about five, six year olds, seven year olds. So they took me to the school, which again came as a little bit of a surprise. There was one very fine building, I think a three story structure with very clean white plaster finish. And Balton is nicely painted windows. But the rest of the school, and it was this higgledy, piggledy, cluttered mass of little semi-derelict buildings. On all different levels, the school was kind of precariously perched on the side of a, well, something between a valley and a ravine, very, very steep, sloping hillside, with buildings perched on stilts and perched on top of each other. Very little space between them. There was no playground. The playground was the roof of one of the classrooms, a corrugated iron roof, where the kids sort of, you know, hung out and played. It's very, very densely packed little cluster of shabby looking buildings with one, you know, rather nice modern structure in the middle of it. I don't know what I'd expected, maybe from the sort of title, the ITBCI school, Indo-Tibetan, you know, but his cultural institute, school. I'd expected something kind of more institutional and a little bit more objectively fine or refined, but it wasn't. It was very much a part of Karim Pong, just a, you know, a ragamaffe in bundle of buildings. But thronging with these delightful kids, and I'm one of the world's pedaphobes, but this place was special, and even now looking at the film I took, looking at those kids, sort of wave upon wave of children coming up and waving at the camera or saluting to it, doing their karate gestures to it. I just phoned myself laughing and smiling. I mean, there was something so delightful about the atmosphere. But the other thing about the atmosphere when arrived was that there were no grown-ups in sight. I couldn't find Dada Rinpoche. I couldn't find Jampol, his assistant. You know, I couldn't find any of the adults. So eventually I did come across an old monk, a very old monk in terravada robes, who I wasn't expecting. And for a moment, I thought, could that be Dada Rinpoche? But, you know, it wasn't. He didn't look anything like the guy I'd seen in the photographs, and he didn't speak any English. You know, I caught sight of a teacher or two through windows, but they didn't speak English. So in the end, being very aware of the time, I mean, it was already midday on my first of two days in Calimpov, I just decided to go into one of the classrooms and by sign language, say, you know, here I am, do you mind if I start filming your class while you do it, which I proceeded to do? And I'd been at it for, you know, maybe only a minute filming these kids, you know, starting their lessons, when the door opened and in walked Rinpoche. Yeah, I mean, it was an extraordinary sight to see Dada Rinpoche. So different to anything I'd expected. As I said, Alama Agache, Tulkua, Bodhisattva, Tibetan. I've no idea what it was I was expecting, but just the sight of this, you know, slight frail, slightly stooped old man. Well, not that old, he was 65, but he looked older and looked frailer. You could tell from the way he walked and carried himself that he had probably been quite wiry and quite physically useful at an earlier stage in his life. But he was sort of on or even, he was past the turn. He just carried a sort of atmosphere of frailness, of physical frailness around himself. But at the same time, that was filled with the most delightful atmosphere of warm concern and lightness. You know, I mean, the word that springs to my mind, you know, always is something maternal. You know, there was a sort of maternal quality of love and concern, just that saturated his face all the time. You know, so whenever you were with him, that was never far away. Sometimes it was very, very much to the fore when he was addressing the children. Or often when he was addressing me, and almost from the start, he treated me like a child. Though he acted like one himself. We sort of immediately started to relate to each other like playmates. We didn't, you know, he had no English and Jampol was still not there. And so when he walked into the room and after we had, we did a lot of, ah, you know, I was very aware that I was doing, ah, I'm not, you know. (audience laughing) If I was thinking at all of that problem, but we just sort of looked at each other with our arms out going, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. (audience laughing) And somehow out of this, you know, came, you know, the realization that we didn't have a translator that to go much beyond, ah, you know, could be problematic. But what happened was, you know, I had this bag full of miniaturized gadgets. I had a little cine camera. I had a little tape recorder. I had a, I know, little, all sorts of little things all fitted into this bag. And the next thing I knew he were at this table and I was showing them to him and he's like, ah, ah, ah. (audience laughing) You're playing with things and holding them. And I didn't know, it was just like, it was like being back at kindergarten. It was just the two of us at this table having fun with these little toys and making jokes about the fact that I was a communist spy and it was like, how we did this? I don't know, but I promise we did. And after a while, I started filming him. But there was something about Dado that when you were with him, you just felt that you'd kind of come home, that you were in the presence of someone who was on the one hand extremely warm and loving and welcoming and at the same time, substantially enough to protect you in a certain way. So it was just this sense of being at home, of being completely secure, being in his presence, which was really quite wonderful and quite magical. I mean, I saw him during those hours in a range of different contexts. While taking me on a little tour of the school, you know, we just walked around the school and he ushered me into classrooms and so on and introduced me to the kids. We came across a little girl. I mean, she couldn't have been more than four, just all on her own out in the alleyway between two of the buildings, crying her eyes out. And Dado just walked up to her and crouched down beside her and produced from this legendary sort of robing. He was a sort of harpo Marx character. A lot of the stories that you hear about Dado Rinpoche, the crucial moment is when he produces something from the voluminous folds of his robes, as the writers put it. From the voluminous, whatever it was, rolls of his folds of his robe, he produced a blackboard. (audience laughing) And chalk started drawing Tibetan characters on this blackboard and showing them to the girl and talking to her and, you know, within seconds, you know, she was happy and she was sort of back and comfortable again. And, you know, he didn't just get up. You know, we stayed there five or 10 minutes, you know, just being with her, making sure she was happy. And on we went, so as I say, there was this side that was very strong, very instantly available in him. But, you know, there was this other side of him, which I've mentioned in that piece I wrote for the commemorative booklet, when I went into his office, such as it was, this dark, ramshackle, little room. I went there to pick up some film, which I'd left there. And came across Rinpoche, sitting across the desk from this mother and child, sitting there intently gazing at these things, these bone, whatever they were, things like dice. And on the table in front of him, with all his score clutter and teacups, there's also some scrolls of Tibetan text. And he was sort of looking at these dice and absolutely screwed up in concentration, something incredibly intense going on. It was as if something else was possessing him to what it was I'd been encountering throughout the morning up to then. Apparently what was happening was that he was diagnosing this kid who was ill. And Dada Rinpoche was well known around Kalimpong for the accuracy of his diagnoses. And whatever it was he was doing with the dice was some sort of oracular technique that he would use to find out what was wrong with the kid. So it was like this whole other side that you could forget that this lovely, warm, cheerful, old man. It was also somebody who was widely known as having these whatever you want to call them, powers or intuitive skills which he again could just deploy on request. You know, our walking, our sort of walk around the premises, particularly in the evening, I remember, meant that we spent quite a bit of time with some carpenters who were doing work, still working on the new building. And again, relating to the carpenters, he was, okay, he just kind of crackled with efficiency and practical awareness. You know, it's just his communication with the carpenters was very directed, very direct. Again, very focused. There was a sort of snappy but clear energy in the air. Again, something very different. And then we spent, I realized I was looking at some notes that I took at the time. We spent 12 hours talking through a translator, a lot of it about the Dharma. And again, there was this whole other side of him, a kind of complete assurance, a completely automatic authority. Nothing heavyweight, nothing, you know, no shouting, no, you know, great show. But he would just speak with straightforward and complete assurance and relaxed authority about all kinds of Dharma issues. So I suppose as these two days went by, I got these different glimpses of the different aspects of Rinpoche. And I suppose what struck me and what still strikes me among other things, but in particular is the kind of flexibility of his energy. There was a sort of innate versatility to him that whatever it was he was doing, he was just completely adapted to it and able to function and direct his energy appropriately. Without any kind of fuss, you know, this wasn't a matter of deploying magic tricks. He was just a guy who was serious about what he was doing. And whatever that took him into contact with, he could just relate to completely, appropriately. And it was a delightful thing to watch. Looking back, and I certainly didn't realize it at the time, and I'm not even sure if I realized it till quite a number of years had gone by. But that meeting, it was very important for me in some ways, but it was also very important for him because it would have happened anyway at some point by some medium. But when I went back to England with the film, with the slides I'd taken, with the talk that I took around the movement, things that I wrote, it played, I suppose, quite an important part in getting us to take on, decisively the financial support of the school. Up till then, Lokamitra had been doing a bit of work, Ashvajit had been doing some work. You know, a few people had been doing small collections to help out. But it was when I visited Rinpoche that almost quite casually in the course of the conversation, he let drop that the school had absolutely no source of funding. The people who'd built the modern building, it was a Canadian charity, but they were no longer able to help the school. The government didn't help the school. You know, so I said, who is helping you? He said, well, we get a little bit of money from your friends. I said, yes, and that was it. And I don't think any of us had any idea how dependent the school was on us, or just how desperate the situation was. So this was something, of course, that I was able to communicate when I got back to England. And it didn't happen instantly, but within a couple of years, I think the Karina Trust took on the ITBCI school. And of course, we have sorted it out. We in the movement have sorted out his worries. But what is interesting to me is that things were at a desperate pitch when I walked through that door. They really did not know where the next month's wages were coming from. They knew that I was involved in this movement, that Sanger actually had set up in England. They knew that there was money there, because they were getting a little bit. But they didn't give the slightest show, of wanting it from me, or they didn't drop kind of crafty hints. I mean, I just found out entirely through my own questioning how bad things were, where their money was and wasn't coming from. I mean, I'm still amazed that they, you know, dado and jump up between them, didn't do some really obvious things that they could have done to ask for help. But it was as if dado just trusted somehow to destiny, that, you know, if this was the time for it to happen, it would happen. And yeah, they would tell me what the situation was, though I often had to really push them to actually get figures as to what the situation was. But they didn't give signs of stress, they didn't burden me with their worries and cares. To be honest, what they burdened me with, you know, and it's almost to my shame that I remember it, is just so many, so many acts of generosity. Which looking back, I didn't feel I reciprocated nearly as much as I could have done. But yeah, when I ran out of tape, because Rinpoche and I spoke together for so much longer than I'd ever imagined we would, he produced another cassette, which, you know, to me, you know-- - Oh, his robe. (audience laughing) - No, no, no, out of the drawer, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. (audience laughing) - I don't think they had a cassette recorder, though. (laughs) They had a cassette. Yeah, you know, he gave me, I mean, when you go to visit a Rinpoche, you're meant to take scarves, you know, these scarves. How come I came away with two scarves? I didn't take any in. You know, I had so many amazing meals. You know, he gave me a lovely carved wooden, sort of traveling bowl set. A bag to put all these things in that he'd given me. I just came away loaded up with presents. You know, there are lots of order members who will tell the story of having been to see him in Kalimpong and discovering when they left that their hotel bill had been played. You know, there would be these extraordinary, small acts of generosity, but they were acts of generosity, which just seemed to be quite spontaneous and, again, appropriate. You know, you were a traveler, you were maybe tired, you hadn't thought of everything. He was just there and he'd help. But looking back, it was just this continuous display of small, but necessary and important, though not dramatic acts of generosity that permeated our time together. And yet there they were, you know, on the verge of bankruptcy and closure. And yet, you know, throughout this time, as I've just mentioned, if anyone was communicating an atmosphere of substance and reassurance and safety, it wasn't me, it was Rinpoche. (paper rustling) We talked, as I say, for something between 10 and 12 hours. A rather cumbersome process where my questions would get translated by Jampal into Tibetan. And then his answers would be translated by Jampal into English. Though, again, at times it seemed, it didn't quite work that way. But we covered a lot of ground. We, I got his life story. We talked about the school. We talked quite a lot about his relationship with Banti. I don't think I'd realized until I met him. Well, I know I hadn't realized until I met Rinpoche that he saw Banti as, what's the word, a disciple as a pupil? I'd thought that they were friends. And maybe that is how Banti sees it, I don't know. But it was interesting to be with somebody who regarded Sangerakshita as one of his disciples, an outstanding disciple. Somebody who he spoke about with, with tremendous respect. Even a degree of reverence, I'd say. And yet at the same time, spoke of him in, it would just, he would let drop in the way he spoke about him in some of his answers to my questions that he had at the same time seen Banti as one of his pupils. And that was quite an interesting experience for me because Banti, as you know, doesn't talk a lot about his own, the sort of more intimate details of his own spiritual struggle and his own spiritual development. He seems to have always come complete and ready-made. It was intriguing to just get this glimpse of somebody who knew Banti and who was in relation to him in a very, very different way to me. But again, what was very clear about it was that Dada and Pichay had very much appreciated Banti's friendship, which had come to him as quite a surprise. But he'd also developed a tremendous respect, both for his sincerity as a Dharma practitioner, but also for the depth of Banti's instinctive grasp of Dharma principles, which was something he had never encountered in any of his disciples before. There's a lot more that could be said about that, but I won't. So we talked about Banti. We talked about Tibet and Tibetan life and the whole Tibetan world. We talked a great deal about Dharma issues and just general issues around the spiritual life. We talked about the refuges. And it was interesting to find that he was somebody who also saw the refuges as being absolutely fundamental and crucial and new as Banti knows, that in seeing things in that way, he was exceptional. He talked about the importance of Sutra and Tantra when we were talking about bringing the Dharma to the West. He started to talk along the lines of you're going to need very good monks, because you're going to need people who can explain the Sutra and Tantra tradition to you. There's no point in taking Sutra and Tantra to the West if you don't have the monks who've lived it and practiced it and studied it, who can explain in absolute detail what it's about. But having said this and gone quite a long way down this track, he then said, but what you know, all this is fine. But if you have people who are really going for refuge, who are absolutely whole-hearted about their going for refuge, this is more important still. And maybe you won't need, on those conditions, you may not need Sutra and Tantra. There was, again, interesting to get a glimpse of somebody whose approach to the Dharma, his own personal approach, was so absolutely Tibetan. I mean, it was interesting to be in the company of somebody for whom all these bits and pieces that we read, these things we pick up about the quality and nature of Tibetan Buddhism, for whom all that is real, for whom the prospect of hell isn't something that you eventually, you occasionally have to discuss in a study group, whether you like the idea or not. Here you're talking to somebody who sincerely believes they're taking a brief tea break from hell. And that is where most of us are going to spend most of eternity. That's just the Tibetan worldview. And he was completely imbued in that worldview. At one point, slightly out of desperation, I said, Rinpoche, do you really have to believe in hell, to be a Buddhist? Because he mentioned hell so often. And he looked a little baffled and said something. And Jampil said, Rinpoche wonders why else you would practice the Dharma. [LAUGHTER] Which is worth thinking of that. He was completely imbued with Tibetan culture. He was a product of it. He had given his life to it. He studied it from four o'clock in the morning till 11 at night. He knew sutras off by heart, tantras off by heart. He'd lived it. He'd practiced it. It was his currency. It was the medium he lived in. And he absolutely valued it. And yet, at the same time, knew that the Dharma was something that transcended culture and any of its particular form of expression. And while occasionally, surprising me by saying, goodness me, hasn't Sangerakjata taught you people how to inject consciousness at the time of death? [LAUGHTER] He was really amazed that Banti hadn't done that. And he told me to go straight back to England and tell Banti. [LAUGHTER] It was very funny. Banti laughed when I told him that. He said, God, most of you can't practice fidelity in the ordinary affairs of everyday life, let alone from one existence to the next. [LAUGHTER] So while Dada University could say things like that at the same time, he was very excited by Banti's project. And he was very aware of what it must be that Banti was doing, in taking the Dharma to a new culture and a new country. And I didn't have to prompt it out of him. He was very clear that taking the Dharma to the West to new circumstances, everything was up for grabs. We were going to have to find out for ourselves how we do it. And what they had in Tibet, he just didn't know how helpful it could be to him. Or for that matter, how helpful Tibetans could be in the West. Because we discussed at one point the number of Tibetan farmers who were working in the West. And he found it very, very hard to understand how they could adapt themselves so as to be effective in the West. Because he knew, from his own experience, two things. One, how corrupt the ordination tradition in Tibet was. He was rather sniffy about Tulkus and Rinpoche and so on. But he also was very aware of just how entirely meshed in Tibetans were to their own culture, which for them was fantastic, to be a Tibetan, to have grown up in a culture which was just innocly dharmic, intrinsically dharmic. And he believed Tibetan culture to be so. That was fantastic for them. But he knew it was almost useless for us. And that we had before us the whole task of discovering that culture and building that culture. He admitted it was something he would have loved to have done if he'd been younger. But the fact that Bante was doing it, that Sangarachita was doing it, he felt very, very excited. And glad that such a man was involved in that project. When I got back to England, somebody transcribed the tapes of my conversations. And after doing so, they said to me, Naka Bodhi, I can't understand why you didn't ask Dada Rinpoche for the White Tara initiation. He was offering it to you on a plate. I've read the transcript myself again a couple of times, and I maybe know what she meant, but I'm not sure. But more to the point, it never even remotely occurred to me to ask Dada Rinpoche for an initiation. In a way, it still surprises me that people did. Quite a lot of people went to Kalimpong and came back with an initiation into one year dharm or another. But I don't mean to tread on any toes. But it's something that I never understood. I can't see why you would go-- I'll say it, because it just popped into my head this way. Why would you waste your time when you're with Dada Rinpoche doing that? OK, forget I said that. All right, just stay with the effect. But to me, to be with Dada Rinpoche, to spend 48 hours with him and to spend those hours of conversation with him, with all the initiation I ever needed, to spend time with somebody like that who had and who communicated the qualities that I've spoken of, was a very, very powerful initiation. And it stays with me in all kinds of ways up to this day. I only have to think of him or begin to visualize him. And I have a very strong connection with a number of wonderful qualities. Something I said, when I went back to Darjeeling, I'd been away for the 48 hours. And I went back to the youth hostel, which is where I was staying in Darjeeling. And there was a couple of English people there who I'd spoken to before going to Kalimpong. And they were still there. They weren't Buddhists. They were just travelers. But as you do when you're traveling, you get talking to people. And they knew that I was going to Kalimpong to meet this Tibetan lama and so on. And one of them said, so how was your lama? And I can't remember everything that I said. But I remember saying, and really meaning that spending time with him challenged your understanding of what it meant to be a human being. There was something essentially different about Dada Rinpoche. It wasn't just that he was a nice old man, but it was where the niceness came from, where the love came from, this quality of radiating love, just the whole spirit of the school, the whole spirit that you encountered when you were with him. It was so clearly coming from a quality of motivation, of self-experience, and so on, that was just radically different to anything I had ever encountered anywhere else, or before. When I do-- as you were visualized, Dada Rinpoche, I remember him. Sometimes I'll see him as this sweet little old man, slightly frail, slightly stooped. But other times I see him in the kind of the regalia of his full Gellupa Geshe status. Because one of the things Bante asked me to do was to get a photograph of him in his full regalia with his hat and with a table and the implements on the table and so on. So at one point I was ushered into his private quarters, not his office. His office was this delightful dark, cluttered room, full of all sorts of magical things in glass gazes. But he had another room, which was much simpler, more austere with some tonkers on the wall above a kind of throne, bench type thing he sat on. And walking in there, having spent all this time with him in his blackboard producing robe. Suddenly there he was in all this stuff. And it did actually take you back a bit. You suddenly realized in another way who and what he was. And sometimes when I visualize him or think of him, I see him in that garb, in that form as well. And when I do-- and when I do remember that he was Dada Rinpoche, a high llama, whatever it was, the 13th, 14th, Dada Rinpoche. I can't remember which number he was, and born in Tibet, abbot of monasteries, and so on. And there he was, looking after a school with financial problems, 200 kids, just if you're a little fragment of the Tibetan story in this cul-de-sac of a town, Kalimpong. Sometimes like Mokshananda in the piece he wrote for that commemorative booklet, I'll find myself wondering, how did it end up like that? How did he end up there? Why didn't the world acknowledge him? Why didn't the world respond to him more? Why did he have to live this life hidden away in Kalimpong? But I think my answer to that riddle, am I supposed to Mokshananda's riddle, is that kind of two sides to the answer. First of all, I think it is hard for us to understand perhaps, but the vision he had for the school was a global one. It was a very, very high vision. He didn't see himself as just looking after some refugee children, or just looking after orphan children. His school was the only place in the world, so far as he knew, where children were being taught the real fundamentals of Tibetan culture, to read and write Tibetan, to do the dances, to know the folk stories and so on. No one else was doing this. There were colleges being set up to teach llamas and to train llamas. The higher culture was being communicated, but nobody was doing anything at grassroots level to keep Tibetan culture alive in the diaspora. And as he saw it, this was absolutely essential, because the culture was the carrier wave for the Dharma. And if that was to go, then the Dharma would go from Tibetan life. And so he saw what he was doing as having a global, almost cosmic significance. So as I say, one should not think that by ending up running this little school, in some way Dado had sold himself short. He saw himself as having the imagination to do something that was of absolutely crucial importance to the survival of Tibetan culture, and therefore of the Tibetan relationship with the Dharma into the future. I asked him at one point why he thought Tibetan culture was so worth preserving. I just said, well, what are the key factors that you would isolate to validate the project? And he said, well, when people came over from Tibet, having lost their country, something that people noticed about them was how much they smiled, how happy they seemed to be despite all their problems. Yeah, that was his answer. I'm sure he could have mobilized many other answers, but it interests me that that was the first answer that he gave. But maybe there's another aspect to dealing with that riddle. Perhaps we have to look at our own expectations and our own assumptions about Dado Rinpoche. He was a high llama, a geshe, a turku, a bodhisattva. And yeah, we sort of maybe expect the world to honor this and to recognize this. As if in some way, perhaps, what we're saying or secretly hoping is that spiritual progress is some sort of guarantee of long life, of good fortune, of fame, as if in some way spiritual progress could be an alternative backdoor route to some kind of material security. Maybe we have to examine our response to Dado Rinpoche's plight by looking at what it is we think we're going to get out of the spiritual life ourselves. Vijayamala has written very interestingly in Shubda and in Dharma life about the shock and disappointment that she's had to deal with as she's been laid out with a pulling back trouble. There was this part of her that was thinking, but I shouldn't be like this because I've been practicing the Dharma. As if we're not careful, some of our motivation for our Dharma practice is this hope of avoiding some of the things that happen to you in the material world. But it ain't like that. To penetrate reality, to see through reality, as I feel Dado Rinpoche had, this doesn't mean to say that you escape its clutches. What it means is that you deal with it better as Dado Rinpoche did. And I've just realized I need a book for a quote. In many ways Dado Rinpoche had a very difficult life. His monastic life was to some extent cut short by illness. He got involved in all kinds of political infighting and feuding at various points in his life and career. He didn't have it easy. And he had a lot of financial worries. And yet day after day after day, he just coped with it as positively as he possibly could and always was able to give to others and help others. He didn't duck his fate. He just responded creatively to it. I'm going to read something that reminds me of him. And it's not a Buddhist thing. It comes from a translation. Sometimes the publisher's blurb refers to it as an American translation of the tauté jing. But I think it provides an interesting side light on Dado Rinpoche. To accept destiny is to face life with open eyes. Whereas not to accept destiny is to face death blindfold. He who is open eyed is open-minded. He who is open-minded is open-hearted. He who is open-hearted is kingly. He who is kingly is godly. He who is godly is useful. So to be able to do what he did was no small thing. And it's interesting that even though on one level, he ended up for many years of his life tucked away in this little forgotten backwater of a town in Kalimpong. Here we are, 10 years after his death, talking about him and here you have a shrine dedicated to him. You're going to devote six months to exploring the significance of a little motto he wrote for his school. We have books about him. We have videos of him. When I go to New Zealand, one of the highlights of my life in New Zealand is the pooges that we do at the stupa that contains some of Dado Rinpoche's ashes at Sudarshanaloka. And a highlight in the life of Turat Naloka in recent years has been the installation of the ashes in the stupa that they've built there. And then there's the stupa at Padmaloka. So even though in some ways, Dado Rinpoche was handicapped by illness, by political difficulties, financial difficulties, even though tucked away in this little town, he ended up having a worldwide significance, which isn't over yet, who knows where it'll lead. The fragrance of the perfect life, sweeter than incense, really does spread in all directions throughout the world. [APPLAUSE] We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com forward slash community. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [ Silence ]
