Finding Oneself in the Losing

A Longtime Student's First-Time Journey to Menri Monastery, India

Polly Turner, Ligmincha International’s director of webcasts and social media, wrote the following article after returning from her first visit to Menri Monastery. Photos were taken by Polly Turner, except the one with His Holiness.

HH 34th Menri Trizin, my brother & meFor 23 years, almost a third of my life, hardly a day has passed when I haven’t connected one way or another with the Tibetan Bön tradition, the indigenous spiritual tradition of Tibet. After first meeting the prominent Bön teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, nearly from the very start I imagined making a pilgrimage to the seat of Bön, Menri Monastery near Dolanji, India, where so many of my friends had made their way. But it was only a few weeks ago that I finally found – and lost – myself there.

When my former husband and I first traveled from the Philadelphia area to Charlottesville, Virginia, in the late 1970s to visit friends, the sunset behind the Blue Ridge Mountains pulled us like a magnet toward that cozy, radiant college town. I felt the very same pull each time we visited thereafter, until one day we pulled into the driveway of our new home there. Twelve years and two children later, an artist friend invited me to venture into town one evening to "check out" a public talk by some Tibetan teacher. There, in the words and presence of Tenzin Rinpoche, I found the same glorious sunset personified. When the teaching was over, someone announced the weekly evening meditation practices we could attend at Ligmincha Institute with Rinpoche and his small, devoted sangha – the community of meditation practitioners. Without hesitation I attended, nearly every week, and soon twice a week. I never looked back.

The esoteric prayers, prostrations, evocative dancing deities on wall hangings, incense, Tibetan terminology, oral teachings penned into countless notebooks in hopes of preserving them somewhere other than the leaky vessel of my mind – all these adornments evoked an essential truth that slowly, steadily, became a shared bloodline among this close-knit group of Charlottesville meditators. Together we tended the shrine in the little center on Forest Hills Avenue that Rinpoche called home. We administered his office matters. We cleaned his kitchen before each of his returns from constant travels to teach worldwide. We baked treats to enjoy with tea after group meditations, edited newsletters, designed logos, held council meetings, maintained a website and e-mail list, hosted offsite retreats, and helped to sell meditation practice supports. With help from generous donors, together we located land for a retreat center and jury-rigged a barn to make a functioning teaching hall. We set up a new meditation center and dharma store downtown. We painted drywall in a newly erected dormitory building. We ran live webcasts. We attended retreat after retreat, after retreat.

During this time Ligmincha's worldwide sangha grew and flourished. The jumble of shamanic, tantric and dzogchen teachings and arcane Tibetan accoutrements slowly settled into shimmering clarity, as we came to embrace the simple, underlying truth to which they all pointed. Whenever I met a student of Bön from anywhere around the world, there was never a question that we shared an essential, grounding and joyful truth. It was no longer so much of a pull. Rather, we were at the center: a silent, clear, confident way of being.

Rinpoche had regularly brought teachers from Menri Monastery to the United States to teach us, or to assist at the retreat center with rituals and prayers. He brought his root teacher, the gentle and formidable Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, the esteemed head teacher of Bön, to whom several Bön lamas referred, unsurprisingly, as a living buddha. He brought His Holiness Lungtok Tenpai Nyima Rinpoche, revered spiritual leader of Bön and abbot of Menri. We relished the visits of these great masters and many other respected visiting lamas. 

Often over the years as I helped to update the text on the Ligmincha website or write an article for publication, I would type out the words “Menri Monastery near Dolanji, India.” I pictured in my mind this holy monastery where Rinpoche had grown up under the close, nurturing guidance of Yongdzin Rinpoche, and where he was part of the first class of Menri students to receive their geshe degrees. Even though several of my sangha brothers and sisters had been there many times over, the monastery seemed shrouded in some magical dimension on the other side of the globe, wholly inaccessible due to the cost and time of travel; to the Indian culture in which women had a lower standing than men; and to reports from friends who went there for just a few weeks, yet afterward had trouble reacclimatizing to the West. 

But finally, saddened by the death of His Holiness in fall 2017, I could no longer deny that the teachers' time, and mine, was running short. What's more, my brother moved to Delhi in his work with the State Department. I joked about visiting him. He encouraged me to come. Surprisingly, he offered to be my travel companion as I toured monasteries. That sealed it. I was sure I couldn't afford a trip around the world. But with the good graces of my new husband and my aging father, whom I'd brought to live near us in coastal South Carolina, I bought the plane ticket. I ordered immunizations for typhoid and Japanese encephalitis – what horrible diseases might one contract just from drinking tap water, being bit by a mosquito, walking in dirt, or breathing in smog? With a 10-year visa in hand and a hurricane at my heels – Hurricane Florence was making a beeline to Wilmington, N.C., my airport of departure, requiring us all to evacuate – I caught one of the very last uncanceled flights out. It seemed meant to be. Twenty-eight hours later, after exiting my final plane in Delhi, I spied a gentleman holding a sign with my name on it, my brother at his side.

Steeped in jet lag, I felt oddly at home in India, comfortable in my skin, but fully at the mercy of my brother, the chaperone. He had taken off a week from his new job, and we hired a driver to usher us on the nine-hour journey north to the foothills of the Himalayas. Before long we were in a car weaving through a chaos of honking traffic that paid no heed to lines in the bumpy road and yet somehow avoided sideswiping all the homeless people, cows and stray dogs that lined the way. Eventually, we wound down a mountainside to an AirBnb deep in the lush countryside and a footpath from the monastery. 

Footpath from the AirBnb to Menri

The next day, Lama Kyap kindly arrived to transport us by car to Menri. Dolanji, it turned out, consists only of a dusty cafe and a couple of glorified mini-garages selling anything from candy and soda to notepads for young monks to scrawl on. A few wary monkeys peered at us from atop a sign over the roadway proclaiming "Tibetan Bönpo Foundation Dolanji." A long stone stairway with a hot iron handrail curved upward – so we were told – toward the still-invisible monastery above. 

My longstanding fear of traveling to Menri was not that I might never make it there, but that I would – and that in so doing, I would become disassembled and unable to put myself back together again. In a way, that fear was justified. After reaching the top of those stairs, throughout the heat of day, at every turn I had to let go of any preconception and sense of control. Menri Monastery is a jumble of glorious buildings and alleyways, built in tiers on the mountainside. Every corner brings a new vista of the vast valley below, a sacred stupa, a residence, a teaching hall, a library, or a small gathering of men or boys clad in maroon robes. 

Hurrying past the main temple

Shrine in the main temple

Menri monks in traditional debate

Lama Kyap took us first to the library's director, Geshe Tri Yungdrung. As we sat down by Geshe-la's desk, Lama Kyap translating, my attention was immediately drawn to a pile of paperbacks next to me that seemed immediately familiar. They were too familiar: an array of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's books in English. For close to 10 years I had labored on two of them as editor, working on the drafts almost daily from my home offices in Virginia and later South Carolina. The dichotomy shook me: Here I was, lost on some alien planet; and yet the most familiar and beloved aspects of my life were irrevocably, intimately linked to this place, these people. I couldn't stop smiling. There was no time to reflect. Geshe-la immediately ushered us on a full guided tour of the library, its texts and artifacts, and then led us through more roadways, alleyways and vistas to the reception room of the monastery's newly enthroned abbot and worldwide spiritual leader of Bön, His Holiness Lungtok Dawa Dargyal Rinpoche, the 34th Menri Trizin. I did three traditional prostrations, we presented His Holiness our silk offering scarves, and he blessed my mala, my Tibetan rosary.

From there my brother and I were ushered to a most-congenial His Eminence Menri Lopon Trinley Nyima Rinpoche, the monastery's head teacher. His Eminience took us out to the stupa where the 33rd Menri Trizin had been cremated and into a small museum dedicated to his relics, a stunning confirmation that this precious teacher of mine was truly gone. Without delay we were shown through the main temple, empty of monks and their ritual drumbeats and chanting. Geshe Thupten Negi, secretary of Lishu Institute in Dehradun, India, kindly treated my brother and me to lunch. The next day a driver allowed us to peer through grimy panes into sacred structures where Yongdzin Rinpoche and Lopon Sangye Tenzin Rinpoche, another of Rinpoche's main teachers, had resided; and then took us to the nunnery across the valley, where an elder teacher poured us apple juice from a crumpled juice box, and where nuns served us rice, greens and beans and invited us to light butter lamps in prayer. As we climbed yet one more set of stairs, I gave a spontaneous, bemused glance to the nun showing us around, and she, like a sister, immediately lit up with a laugh.

Lighting butter lamps at the nunneryLater, my brother and I revisited the monastery on our own, feeling our way through the maze. We took a side trip to the nearby bustling town of Solan, where we followed steep alleyways through a chaos of vendors hawking food, Indian fabrics, and who knows what. Wilting in the heat, we lost our way. A couple of teenage girls pulled me next to them to steal a fast selfie with this exotic, sweaty Westerner in her wide-brimmed hat. 

On the road back to Delhi

It was all utterly impossible and utterly rich, colorful and delicious. We lost ourselves over and over, and continually found ourselves somewhere else. There were moments to breathe, and little time to exhale. Within a few days, we found ourselves being driven back to Delhi. A few days later, somehow, some way, I found myself on the plane home. There were 30 hours of negotiating screening checkpoints, waiting at airports and sitting in airplanes. My husband greeted me outside of baggage claim and transported me back to our seaside condo. 

My dad was fine. The condo had weathered the hurricane. The electricity was back on, the Wi-Fi worked. But nothing has functioned the same since, nothing has quite been in control. How can it be under control, now that the deities have jumped from their wall hangings and drawn me into the dance? Even my blessed mala broke, its beads spilling across the kitchen floor. Twenty-three years of practice and devotion to Bön could never have prepared me for the walk up the stairs to the other dimension, the center of the mandala. I know I can't send the deity back to the wall. But I will continue sitting, time and again, on my meditation cushion, observing the constant, eddying thoughts and feelings, and learning how to rest, allow and just be.