“I was in Korea for seven years. But soon after I arrived Kusan Sunim passed away, so then there was no reason for me to stay at Songgwangsa monastery—it became like an empty shell. There was no real lineage holder who I had any confidence in, nobody I could talk to. Something happened—when the master went, that vital energy also went. My Korean wasn’t good enough to go and live at any of the other temples unless there was a translator, so though I went around and lived in different hermitages, I didn’t really have the ability to ask the kind of questions I would have liked to ask. But I’d had the teachings that I needed at that time.
I went into quite a long period of semi-retreat, living in a hermitage on an island between Korea and Japan. I was doing mostly Dzogchen practice. At the time I didn’t see much difference between Seon [Zen] and Dzogchen, but now I realize the approach is different. The starting point with Dzogchen is really “pointing out instructions.” Until you have confidence in your own nature, even a glimpse, no more doubts, you can’t utilize the path because the path is that recognition. That’s what self-liberates everything that appears as if it’s something solid. The language we use is different in Dzogchen practice. Every other approach would be considered a causal path except for Dzogchen, which is a resultant path. That means that you use the result, which is the View [of things as they are], as the path. You can’t understand that unless you’ve been introduced to your own nature. You can’t even know how it works. Seon is very much about being present—I think that’s very much the philosophy and discipline. We don’t have that kind of discipline in the Tibetan tradition.
It’s incredibly freeing because you don’t think about which way you’re going to do something. You just do it, and you’re present when you’re doing it. Whether it’s putting on your robes or washing your clothes, there’s an exact way that it has to be done. In the beginning it’s very hard to live like that because you always have that feeling, “I don’t want to do it this way. Why is this right? I don’t know if I agree with that.” All that mental gossip that doesn’t allow you to be present. You know, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”—that’s very much emphasized in Zen. The form has to be a certain way. The way you dress, the way you sit, the way you eat. It looks beautiful if everybody does it the same way. No questions. So then you’re free, instead of “Shall I do it this way? That’s right, that’s wrong . . .” You can then just be present in whatever it is that is happening.
From Korea I moved to the Philippines, where I was really involved in social work. I was on my way to Africa. I felt that I had a karmic connection with Africa from the past. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought that if I went to Africa maybe I would learn something that I had to do. It was so strong, ever since I was a child. But I have never really spent much time there— earlier, in 1967, I spent a year in North Africa and I have made a few visits to Capetown, but I’ve never really lived there. The Philippines was really about putting practice into a work situation. I was working with the lepers, setting up projects for the leper colonies, mostly agriculture and education. During my time in this community I built a boat and was living on it at sea for almost two-and-a-half years, going from island to island in these remote areas. I was living in a kind of semi-retreat situation, either on the boat or on an island, and then sponsoring some projects myself through taking people out diving. I know nuns are not supposed to be doing all this, but never mind! You have to make use of the skills you have, and I had a lot of diving equipment and also a lot of experience in diving. I learned in Thailand, and ended up really loving the world under the sea.
Someone from Hong Kong came out on my boat one day and saw how sick I was getting—again—and invited me to come to Hong Kong to stay with her and get some medical attention. So then I came to Hong Kong—that was around ‘89 or ‘90—but I didn’t stay so long, maybe three months. I then went back to the Philippines, but I saw it was now going to be too difficult for me there. The boat had been severely damaged and I didn’t have any money to repair it, and things just weren’t going so well. I didn’t see the Philippines being very productive any more, so I decided to come back to Hong Kong.
When I first arrived I took up residence on Lamma Island and was invited to teach at various universities, but I soon developed spinal problems that required complex surgery. Because of that I spent most of 1994 in hospital, and again in 2006, when all the spinal implants had to be renewed in Taiwan to prevent potential paralysis. For much of my life I have had to work with physical disabilities involving a great deal of pain, but I feel this is very much part of my path and has contributed to my character today—I don’t give up easily when there are challenges to face, especially when I believe that what I’m doing will bring benefit to others in some way.
I lived on Lamma (Hong Kong) for a number of years, and during that time I initiated a community center called “Wisdom Heart.” It didn’t just focus on the Buddhist approach, but was really open to varied approaches to what might be termed “spirituality.” Many people were looking for a path that could make sense of their lives, and so I tried to offer a variety of teachings to the community, inviting masters from various lineages to come and give talks there whenever they could. Today, many of the people who participated in the community center at that time are committed practitioners. Then later I moved to live on Lantau Island, where I found a small hermitage up behind the Big Buddha very near Po Lam Monastery, which focuses on the Chan [Zen] tradition. In that hermitage I embarked on another long solitary retreat until health problems returned, and on advice from my guide for that retreat, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, I sought medical assistance and unfortunately had to give up.
After I left the retreat in Hong Kong, I called him (Chagdud Rinpoche) in Brazil and said I was concerned that he was getting old and I was getting sicker, and before one of us died I really wanted to spend some time with him again. Originally I went there for a few months, and after I began to travel around, he felt I had a karmic connection with the northeast of Brazil. He asked if I was really ready to leave Asia, and invited me to be his representative for the northeast. I then came back to Hong Kong to get a religious visa that would allow me to stay there long-term and also to pack things up. I arrived back in Brazil on New Year’s Eve in 1999.
I first based myself in the city of Maceio, where we managed to put together quite a large center. I also managed to set up about 11 groups and other centers around the northeast, from the Amazon Basin down to Rio. I stayed in Maceio for about three years, but did not particularly like living in the city and felt that possibly a project in a more rural area could be more expansive and benefit more people. After searching around, I came across a region in the interior of the state of Bahia called Chapada Diamantina National Park, which felt right, and some time later I received a telephone call from the community in the small town of Mucuge in the region saying they wanted to offer me some land in order to develop the project I envisioned for “human development.” This project was to be called Dipamkara's Vision, a name given by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.
Though a wonderful aspiration, Dipamkara's Vision never really got off the ground as there weren’t enough funds to build the kind of infrastructure that might have been needed and there was no real interest from the community to help implement these ideas. Then later I was shown the valley of Monte Azul, which is 30 kilometers from Mucuge and which I thought would be ideal for a retreat center, and so I managed to acquire that 200 hectares of land as well. I decided to focus more on Monte Azul, and have led a number of retreats on the land. I also found a cave there, and spent the year 2012 in it doing solitary retreat.
After spending almost ten years in that region, I now feel it is time to move to another state that might make it possible for more people to have access to a retreat environment. So recently I acquired a further 220 acres of land in the state of Minas Gerais in a place called Alagoa. Once again I will start from scratch, as there is nothing there except beautiful land. Still, already I feel there is much more interest from people in the surrounding region. The new center will be called Ati-ling, a name given by HH Dudjom Yangsi Rinpoche…
I find the Brazilians very open, very receptive, quite playful, and very interested in Buddhism, though it takes time to introduce the value of these ideas enough to inspire people to want to integrate them into the way they see life. You know, it took 20 years from the time Chōgyam Trungpa first went to America for people’s minds to really mature enough to digest the teachings, for them to be able to integrate them into daily life. So in Brazil it will also take time.
Buddhism is something new in Brazil. Like mindfulness, it’s become fashionable, but to help people to see how it works in daily life, that’s the real test. I have some students in each group that are really practicing and integrating what they learn from their practice into their field of work. Quite a few of my students are doctors, psychotherapists, and physicists, and some have now developed courses around my teachings. They don’t actually say, “This is Buddhism,” but they use the teachings in integrated medicine, and they’re really working—they’re really benefiting a lot of people. For example, a lot of cancer programs are using my teachings to help work with the trauma of cancer. It’s really quite good to see how they’re working there.
I’d like to mention that the path does not depend on what you call yourself or how you identify yourself. We need to look at the motivation or the intention of the people who are practicing. If we’re just looking at a way to maintain our comfort zone, it’s not going to go very far. But for some of these people this is only the first component of the teachings. Some of these people are suicidal, and it’s really helping, it’s giving them a different way of seeing life. Now they’re full of joy and wanting to get on with it.
This is the first module of the program I teach, and then slowly, once people become more receptive to these basic teachings and see how they can take responsibility for their life experiences, we introduce more and more profound ways of transformation.
Some of my students have carried out a detailed research program on the results of this training process, which is being written up and presented as a master’s course and possibly a PhD. The doctors who are working on it have done some very interesting research. And now more and more of the local government officers are interested in running courses. These people have not established the View yet, but the ground is being prepared so that when the seed is planted, they will have the space to be able to see more clearly. Whereas, most of us don’t give ourselves any space whatsoever to see anything. We’re so busy trying to get things to be a certain way so that we can feel better in some way. We think that if we get it just right, then that’s the answer to what we’re looking for. My teachings show people a very different way of seeing things. Here we’re not looking at the things, appearances, themselves, we’re looking at the space that the appearance emerges from and dissolves back into.
If we follow a path, any path, we must have a starting point, and we must have some idea where we’re going and why—some clear orientation. Basically, the whole path of Buddhism is involved in the dimension of what we call “mind”—nothing else. So then, what’s the starting point? Basically we have to understand and acknowledge that the way we see life now is totally confused and distorted. That’s the starting point - acknowledging our confusion, and also not running away from it, but in a way, making friends with it. If you treat your confusion as an enemy, you’re never going to want to look at it in depth, whereas if you treat it as a friend, as the fertilizer for your path, then you want to know more and more details about how the confusion works.
It’s by understanding that very same confusion that wisdom begins to reveal itself. Wisdom comes from seeing things as they are—not according to our conditioned way of seeing, but according to the awakened way of seeing. So where are we going? We’re going from the starting point of confusion and then gradually, as we weaken the habits and tendencies that make up confusion, what reveals itself is our own awakened nature. It doesn’t happen by running away from the confusion but by working with it, by understanding our neurotic habits and tendencies, our emotional ups and downs, all of which are the basis of our daily life. That is our path, and that is also our liberation. Wisdom and confusion are not separate at all. They’re just different ways of looking at the same thing.”
~ Ani Zamba Chozom was one of the first Westerners to be ordained as a Buddhist nun. Born in England in 1948, a serious illness as a teenager aroused in her a strong desire to benefit others. In search of answers to her confusion about life, in the 1960s she traveled overland to India, and has since practiced in many different countries and traditions. Today she lives mainly in Brazil, where her practical teachings, rooted in the simplicity of Dzogchen, are proving an inspiration to Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.
Photos ~ In Hong Kong with Karma Tharchin Rinpoche,
With Chagdud Rinpoche, at Khadro Ling, In the cave on the retreat land at Monte Azul, Brazil,
With His Eminence Gyalwa Dokhampa, Recife, Brazil, At Khadro Ling, 2014 ok
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