Stranger in a Strange Land

"I suffered my father’s death and became ever more determined to find myself. Briefly back in New York for the funeral, I met Geshe Wangyal, a Mongolian monk living just down the road in New Jersey. I felt a power, an intensity around him in his pink house with its crude and colorful chapel; on his small acre next to a concrete Russian Orthodox church. In his presence it was hard for me to speak; my knees felt weak and my stomach unsettled. Yet the amazing thing was that Geshe Wangyal himself seemed as if he were not there. He had nothing to do with me, to me, or for me. He seemed fully content and unconcerned for himself. When I couldn’t find “him,”I was forced to ask myself, Who is this “me”I’ve been pursuing? At twenty-one years old, after dropping out of college, leaving a new marriage, barely able to take care of myself, I felt a hint of something beyond my self.

Geshe Wangyal was unlike anyone I had ever met. As a teenaged monk he had nearly died of typhoid in the hot Black Sea summer. His mother heard that the monks had given him up for dead, so she came to the monastery and spent three days sucking the pus and phlegm out of his throat and lungs to keep him from suffocating. When he awoke, the first thing he was told was that she had succumbed to the disease she saved him from and died on the very day he recovered. He was appalled when he observed that though he felt grief at the news, another current in his mind would not let him think of anything else except his overwhelming thirst after his ten-day fever. Noting this dreadful degree of selfishness, he resolved then and there to give his last ounce of effort to freeing himself and others from such involuntarily selfish impulses. I had never encountered directly such unconditional compassion in my entire life. I was hooked.

Geshe Wangyal told me he wouldn’t be my guru, since he felt he was no high being and that I was not capable of traveling the difficult path of spiritual development. But he conceded that whatever he had learned of value in his life had come from Tibetan books, and he had an inkling that I might find something of value in them myself. Since I was not a monk, I couldn’t stay in his monastery, so I would have to find my own lodging. He agreed to feed me and to teach me to read Tibetan if I taught English to some young monks he had in his care. One week later I was back in New Jersey, cleaned up, and ready for studies, having sold my ticket to New Delhi to pay the rent.

During the first Tibetan lesson, Geshe Wangyal spoke of suffering, and my world shifted dramatically. We’re born, we get sick, we get old, we die. We crave comfort and happiness but never seem to find it. We fear losing what little we have. It was a mind-opening experience for me to learn that living without knowing what I was doing and why I was doing it was causing me to suffer. Living with the fear of the world blowing up; chasing after knowledge, sex, pleasure, and myself; and trying to escape reality certainly left me coming up empty—all I did was crave more of everything. Before this lesson, the answers to my questions seemed to be just around the corner. I’d turn the corner only to find something else to desire, and the chase would start all over again. It was the chase that was making me miserable, and somewhere inside me was an idea that was driving the chase. For the first time, someone was telling me that there was a way to free myself from the whole chase. I was being asked to face suffering, but at the same time, I was discovering that there was a way to end that suffering...

I felt like a stranger in a strange land—not skillful enough to manifest my dream of bringing happiness to those around me; not wanting to return to my old way of life. There seemed no future for me in America as a monk, no community to support my progress like there had been among the Tibetans, and no way to share with my contemporaries the joy and clarity I had found. So, after much soul-searching, I left the monkhood. Though I knew I had made the right decision, I still felt a great sense of shame knowing that my teachers, particularly Ling Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama, would feel deeply disappointed.

Geshe Wangyal had never recommended my becoming a monk—now that I was one, he would not take responsibility for my reconsideration. I resigned my vows and tried to give my robes back to him, but he referred me to His Holiness. I resolved to make up for my failing by pursuing my practice as ardently as I did as a monk, but at the same time I felt too proud to return to my previous life in lay society. I was caught in the mistake of confusing a modicum of knowledge and a few intense meditative experiences with genuine, stable, nonregressing, enlightened awareness. The question was what to do with myself. While I respected my lamas in India and my teacher in New Jersey, I felt I had nothing to learn from anyone else in the West. Obviously, I had a long way to go.

My greatest danger at this time was the temptation to become a guru. People knew I had been a Buddhist monk, and it was hard for them to distinguish between a monk and an ex-monk. I knew enough of the main teaching systems of Tibetan Buddhism and could meditate well enough to achieve altered perceptions and insights into the nature of mind to have built up a following. Though I was still proud, I did have the example of Geshe Wangyal, who had always refused to gather a big circle of disciples. If he, learned as he was, wouldn’t become a guru, how could I presume to be a spiritual master? It was obvious that I
would have to find some sort of profession to earn my living independently so I would never be tempted to use people’s desire for spiritual growth for my own economic gain. I decided that I wanted to learn more Buddhist languages, read more Buddhist texts, and continue to discover the vast new continent of the Dharma. The only lay institution in America comparable to monasticism is the university, so in the end I turned to academia.

Luckily, I found a soul mate, Nena, with whom I fell in love, and began to rediscover family, school, profession, and even America. She also became my teacher, my “show-me”spiritual friend, who was less interested in high-flown talk or abstruse practices than in daily performance of the teaching in positive action. We soon experienced the miracle of the birth of a delightful boy, named Ganden by Geshe Wangyal after the joyous paradise of Maitreya the future Buddha. He was soon joined by his sister, who naturally owned the name of the Indian Mother-goddess, Uma. More beautiful children followed.

I found it hard to integrate my Buddhist way of life with the world of modern America and the competitive demands of professional academia. Having a role to play—that of an impoverished young graduate student with a new family—at least provided some cushion. After I finished three years of grueling study of languages, social sciences, Asian history, and world philosophy while trying to learn to be a husband to Nena and a father to two energetic new babies, I got a research grant to visit India. I would be able to see my teachers again. It was 1970, and I had not been there for five years."
-- Robert Thurman, Inner Revolution