“…Before meeting her future teacher, Wesleyan University Professor Jan Willis had a near death experience in a terrible automobile accident while hitchhiking from Paris to Lyon. After Willis’s first meeting with Lama Yeshe in Nepal, his parting words were: “Lama is so happy you… have come, especially after… you know… that bad thing in France.” “I began to experience a strange, though pleasant, sensation. It was unlike any sensation I had ever experienced before: a sort of warm tingling feeling that began at the nape of my neck and then radiated downward and outward to encircle my whole body. Then, as though I had suddenly stepped into an invisible field of static electricity, I noticed that the hairs on my skin stood up erect.” She had never discussed her accident or traveling in Europe with him. How could he have possibly known?...”
“I was flying on Delta Airlines. The company’s biggest hub is Atlanta; they fly hundreds of flights into Birmingham and their pilots have a first-rate flying record. Hence, for most of the flight into Hartford, I was feeling pretty relaxed…Seated beside me were an older woman who had seemed frightened for most of the trip and a young girl who was, presumably, her grandchild. I smiled encouragingly before I spoke to her, “Okay! See, there’s the runway! It won’t be long now.”
We were no more than a few feet above the tarmac. The plane’s landing gear was down, its headlights illuminating the field. Then things abruptly changed. In an instant, the plane veered steeply upward. It went into a climb that was almost perpendicular. We were like astronauts, our heads pressed back against our seats, our bodies feeling the G-forces of lift-off. My own knuckles went white. Papers from somewhere started blowing through the compartment. Overhead doors snapped open. Oxygen masks dropped. Some people started to scream. I started to pray, at first aloud and then silently, but speeded up, with urgency. I called on both my guru, Lama Yeshe, and upon Jesus. “Lama Yeshe!” I screamed, “May I never be separated from you in this or future lives!” Gripping my armrests, I continued in silence, “May you and all the Buddhas help and bless us now!” Without pausing, I then fervently intoned, “Christ Jesus, please help us. Please, I pray, bless me and all these people!”
I call myself a “Baptist-Buddhist”…because it is an honest description of who I feel I am. When I was on that plane, racing straight upward through the frigid night air, I did not feel as though I were simply hedging my bets. I felt sheer and utter terror, and I called on both traditions for help... my mother did let me know, in subtle and not so subtle ways, that she worried for my soul and its salvation. Many others...have stridently voiced disdain and disapproval:
“Either you believe in Christ, our Lord, as your sole and only savior, or you’re lost!” To this I can only say, “Well, I trust that Jesus Himself is more understanding and compassionate.” ...As always, in matters of faith and of the heart, a little concrete experience and practice usually takes one higher, while at the same time sets one on firmer ground.
If I have learned anything about myself thus far it is that in my deepest core I am a human being, graced by the eternal truths espoused both by Baptists and by Buddhists. And more than that, I am aware that it is not any particular appellation that matters. For ultimately, what I have come to know is that life—precious life—is not a destination. Life is the journey.”
~ Jan Willis grew up in Docena, Ala., a small mining town just outside of Birmingham, which she described as the most segregated city in America at the time. Her father, a steelworker, was deacon at a Baptist church the family attended. "Racism was palpable" during her childhood, she said, and hate crimes against blacks -- including children -- were common. Willis experienced this firsthand when a burning cross was planted on the lawn of her family's home...
Willis first became interested in Buddhism, having seen news footage of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns immolating themselves to protest the war. "I wanted to know how someone could be brave enough to do that," she recalled. Her interest solidified when, while studying in India, she met several exiled Tibetan Buddhists. Despite the fact that they had recently fled from their home country following persecution by the Chinese, they struck her as being incredibly cheerful, she remembered. While traveling through Asia during the early 1970s, she became the student of Tibetan lama Thubten Yeshe, who encouraged her academic pursuits. She received BA and MA degrees in philosophy from Cornell University.
Photos ~ Lama Yeshe and Jan Willis, 1974 ~ Jan Willis, in front of Buddhist icons
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