In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte ,and#8221;Dhardo Rimpoche, A Spiritual Friend,and#8221; Sangharakshita recalls his own personal friendship with the great Tibetan Lama, Dhardo Rimpoche. From the talk and#8220;The Six Distinctive Emphases of the FWBOand#8221; given at Padmaloka in 2002. Note the FWBO is now the Triratna Buddhist Community.
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Dhardo Rimpoche, A Spiritual Friend
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. All right, that's the fifth distinctive emphasis, and the sixth and last one, of course, is the importance of friendship, especially spiritual friendship. No sound without friendship. Friendship is the bedrock of the Sangha, spiritual friendship. And I'm sure this is a very well ventilated subject, and all sorts of occasions. We all know what the Buddha said about friendship, spiritual friendship, being not a half, but the whole of the spiritual life. So I'm not going to try to cover this particular ground in a way that I've covered the other five distinctive features of the F.W.B.O. Instead, I'm going to speak about, yes, my third topic, my friendship with Dr. Rinpoche. And here we begin to approach the end of the talk. I did mention that at the very beginning, that when I was asked to speak about to make my friendship with Dr. Rinpoche, the subject of all talk, I wasn't sure that I had enough material for the whole talk. So, I mean, that might have surprised you, but yes, it's a fact. But what is the reason for that? Well, the reason was that, in a sense, my friendship with Dr. Rinpoche, who was extended over, well, practically the whole of my time in Kalimpong, which was 14 years, was not a very eventful friendship. Not a very eventful friendship. A friendship after all is not a love affair, not like a love affair, well, not usually from friendships. Or perhaps that hasn't been really my experience. A friendship doesn't have the ups and downs onto dramatic eutons and reversals that a love affair has. It's a comparatively sober affair. So, there's no very dramatic history to relate. It just continues usually on its own steady course. So, I think this is why I felt that I didn't really have much to say about my friendship with Dr. Rinpoche. There were no dramatic developments. We didn't have any quarrels. We never quarreled. So, there was never any reconciliation. Our friendship was, well, I was going to do the same steady level, but no, it did very gradually sort of ascend. But there weren't any dramatic leaps or bounds or anything of that sort. But digging around in my memory, yes, there are some things which I could say about my friendship with Dr. Rinpoche. The first thing that occurred to me when I really started reflecting was that we were two very different people. We were very different in our background. Well, think of my background. I was born in England, in London, in tooting of all places. Usually, in England, friends from overseas may not appreciate this. But usually, very often I find in England, when tooting is mentioned, people usually laugh. It's a ridiculous sort of place, you know. It's not the sort of place where I would choose to be born in. That was where I grew up, tooting, yeah. So, yes, I grew up in a very orderly family, was in bed for a couple of years, had very little education. I worked in a coal merchant's office, you know, for a month. I was a minus civil servant for two years. Then I was in the army for three years, and then I had a wandering life in India and became a monk. We moved to Kanimpong. Well, that was my background, yeah. So, so what was Dr. Rimsch's background? Well, to begin with, he was an incarnate lama. He was a Bodhisattva. I was nowhere near being a Bodhisattva. I found it difficult, even to be an other hand. [laughter] Not only was he, you know, an incarnate Bodhisattva. He had a very elaborate, Buddhist education in one of the top, you know, Gedukpa universities in Nassan. He passed through the whole course with flying colours and became the Dalai Lama's cultural and religious representative, you know, in India. He was very, very highly regarded. I was, well, at that time, just an ordinary, well, the bikhovenu to all appearances. So, we were very different in background, yeah. And, well, I think I'm not sure how different we were in character and temperament, yeah. I think by nature, I must admit, I think Rinpoche had a kinder nature than I did. I think I've had to hard work a bit on my compassion, but Rinpoche seemed to find it quite naturally to it. But then, of course, he was a Bodhisattva. So, what we want to expect, yeah. Bodhisattva was a naturally compassionate, yeah. But I think we were similar in certain respects. We were both not exactly reserved. Well, we weren't very touchy-feely, you know, for that way. And he took us, you know, quite a while to become friends. And I remember the circumstances under which we first met. I mean, Rinpoche was the abbot of the Tibetan monastery down in Bodhagaya. And there was a more Bodhisattva society sent to bear, almost next door. And there'd been some friction between the two. And one of my friends in Calcutta, connected with the Marbuddhi society, asked me to go and see Daldur Rinpoche, who was at that time in Kanepor, and see if I could sort it out. And those were the circumstances under which I first met Daldur Rinpoche. There was it once struck by his straightforwardness and his honesty. And I realized at once that, well, there was, as regards to the friction between the Gumpa and the Marbuddhi society. And certainly it wasn't Rinpoche's fault. I was quite convinced of that. So that was our first contact. And subsequently he invited me for the opening of the Indo-Tibet Buddhist Cultural Institute and the school. And I gave a few talks there. So in that way, gradually we got to know each other. And I think a lot of our important element in our friendship is the fact that we each appreciated that the other really did try to cherish the doctrine. Certainly Rinpoche cherished the doctrine. I knew that. And I cherished the doctrine. And I think he realized that from my general attitude and hear from some of the lectures, which I gave under the auspices of his Institute, lectures which were new translated into Tibet. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this screen. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] You [BLANK_AUDIO]