Sangha Sharing
Giving Thanks
A letter from senior student Polly Turner to sangha and other friends on Thanksgiving Day, 2009
Dear friends,
Some years ago when Yongdzin (Lopon) Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche was teaching at Serenity Ridge, I arranged an appointment to meet with him. When I entered the shrine room in the lama house, I asked him if he would activate my new thangka for me, and he did so.
Usually when we go in to meet with a great master it is good if we have a question to ask or some other clear intent, but all I wanted to do was share one brief statement. So after Yongdzin Rinpoche wrote the Tibetan syllables on the back of the thangka and sat back to see what our meeting would entail, I said to him:
"Rinpoche has been a very pure teacher to me."
There was a moment of silence, and I worried it would be an awkward one. But Yongdzin Rinpoche suddenly broke into laughter and spouted out:
"Thank you!"
He repeated "Thank you!" several times over, laughing all the time.
That was the end of the visit, and I left, feeling a bit stunned but glad I had said something that had made him so happy. It was as though I had given Yongdzin Rinpoche the biggest gift I could ever have given him, and I didn't know quite why this was.
I came to understand better years later, when I learned the story from my teacher, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, of the extent of the responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders by his root teacher. Lopon had escaped from Tibet during the Chinese Cultural Revolution with a gunshot wound, and was among only two other senior Bon lamas of his generation who managed to escape to the West. Many of the lamas and other Bonpos who escaped with their lives underwent great hardship and unimaginable stress on arriving in India and Nepal, and some died while doing road work in the hot sun.
Countless Bon monasteries and precious texts and ritual items were destroyed in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. Lopon and the current spiritual leader of the Bon tradition, His Holiness Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, knew that their ancient tradition, which had been passed in an unbroken lineage from master to student for centuries, was on the verge of complete extinction. With help from others they managed to save some texts of the teachings and bring them to the West. In India and Nepal they founded Tibetan communities and built monasteries from the ground up.
But without also preserving the knowledge in people — transmitting the wisdom knowledge to others — they knew all of their struggles would be fruitless.
As a young monk at Menri Monastery in Dolanji, India, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche was among a select few monks who were first to receive their geshe degrees there after studying rigorously for upwards of 12 years toward the degree, day in and day out. Rinpoche felt great responsibility to learn all the teachings and rituals, with the knowledge that he and his fellow monks were very likely the last hope for this beautiful and amazing wisdom tradition. This message was conveyed to him by Lopon, and he took it to heart.
Rinpoche somehow ended up teaching in the West, and we students have been the beneficiaries of his mission.
When I told Yongdzin (Lopon) Rinpoche that Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche had been a very pure teacher to me, I meant that there has not been one moment in all the many teachings I've received from him, in my private consultations with him, or in my volunteer work, where he has sacrificed the purity of the teacher-student relationship and where I have not felt that what Rinpoche has done or said has been a very pure and direct teaching to me. Sometimes it takes a while before I realize what the teaching is, but I never have had a moment's question about the purity of this relationship, and I have experienced it as a long series of countless gifts, one after another, over the years.
And now, I can see what a gift it is for Rinpoche's teacher, Yongdzin Rinpoche.
Normally I don't make that much of Thanksgiving, but for some reason, these days on the meditation cushion I am feeling a huge amount of gratitude. This seems a good day to say "Thank you!"
In Bon,
Polly
Charlottesville, Va.