Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. I would like to dedicate my talk this morning and our being together to the remembrance of our dear friend and great teacher, Taratul Guru Rinpoche, who died the evening of the 27th in Dharamsala,

[01:05]

and whose body will be cremated at dawn tomorrow morning, which means 5.30 this evening. So I would invite any of you who can to hold him in your thoughts, in particular during that time beginning at 5.30 this evening, when this ceremony of cremation will be taking place. I'd also like to take this as an occasion to consider together this business of ancestors, or elders as we refer to them sometimes, in the Buddhist tradition. Because, of course, on the occasion of the passing of a great teacher, one does think rather poignantly about those who have gone before us. Certainly that has been true for me in the last few weeks since I first discovered that Tara Rinpoche was dying.

[02:09]

So what I want us to consider is both the ancestors, those who go before us, and also implicit in that consideration is our relationship or response to impermanence, the great thorn of our lives. One of the things I've bumped into in the last few weeks as periodically strong sadness has arisen in me is to recognize that it arises repeatedly around my clinging to some expectation that I would be with Tara Rinpoche again. We were planning a retreat this winter. And so when I focus on what is not going to happen, it takes my attention away from all that I have received.

[03:16]

And when I focus on all of the great benefits that have come to me and to all of us through his guidance and inspiration and teaching, what comes up is joy and happiness and not grief. So a lot of my practices in the last few weeks have been for myself and certainly not for him. He's been just fine. He's the last one we need to worry about. The monks from the Gyuto monastery have sent several faxes. They love the telephone and now they love the fax machine. And they have repeatedly described Tara Rinpoche's state of mind since he first got sick in the beginning of May, or at least visibly unwell, as being serene and calm. And then they say, But of course, what would one expect from such a great practitioner?

[04:18]

As the Namgyal monk said in the museum recently when someone jumped in the middle of their sand mandala a day or so from it being completed and destroyed it, one of them said later, Oh, this was a big test of our practice. Big test for our state of mind is what we're saying we're doing, what we're actually doing. Here's a good test. There is at this time of year, not even at this end of the valley, but at the lower end of the valley and along Redwood Creek where I live, there's a particular bird called the Swainson's thrush that comes at this time of year only. So I've been hearing the sound of the Swainson's thrush call, what I call the watery flute sound, for a few weeks. And it always brings up for me some sense of this time of year

[05:27]

that almost bypasses the frontal lobe. It's so visceral. This particular bird has a lovely call, a lovely song, which sometimes goes on and on. And interestingly, whenever I hear the Swainson's thrush call, I'm vividly aware that I will only hear it for a short time. So there is a kind of poignancy in hearing the song of the Swainson's thrush that comes up in a way that includes the fact that I will not hear it by the end of the summer and beginning of the fall because it goes away. Friday morning, after we had finished our sitting together

[06:31]

at the church in Tiburon where I practiced with a group of people on Fridays, my husband came to the door to tell me that the call had just come, saying that Rinpoche had died. And so several of us gathered here to ring the big bell a hundred and eight times to mark the occasion of his passing over. And again I was struck by the beauty of the sound of the bell. As the small group of us were standing in line, each of us taking a turn to hit the bell. And with this wonderful big bell that we have here, when you hit it a number of times, something happens with the sound that the bell makes. It becomes very large and resonant. And it goes out down the valley. And I was struck as we were hitting the bell

[07:35]

and listening to the sound of the bell that so much of my joy in hearing the bell includes the fact that the sound fades away. My joy does not arise in spite of that impermanence quality, but includes it. And how much, in the same way, Tara Rinpoche's presence in the world has been like the sound of that bell. So recently I've been doing this prayer that a friend of mine sent to me. She said this is a traditional prayer to recite at the time when a great teacher is passing. And it is in the version of it that I have called Reverence to You Holy Elders. It's quite lovely. And it is a prayer to the sixteen arhats,

[08:41]

or saints, if you will, great practitioners from the early days of the Buddhist path. And in many systems includes one or two additional arhats who were not monks but were laymen. I was thinking this morning as I was writing out a list of the names of the arhats how maybe the contribution here in this country or in the West to the list of arhats will be that eventually there will be a woman arhat's name on the list. I hope so. Fortunately, some of the paintings of these arhats, they're pretty androgynous looking, and that helps. And in this prayer, the prayer begins with some recognition and reverence for Shakyamuni Buddha,

[09:42]

that Buddha who lived in the world as a human being just like all of us and who attained this great awakening, this great consciousness, which has been the source for our practice and study. For those of you who don't know much about the arhats, I encourage you to meet them. They're often depicted as craggy, eccentric, funky types. And they're described in this prayer as being the ones who opened, first of all, they received the teachings from the Buddha, so that's part of their function. They then are described as opening the treasure chest of the true teachings and spreading those teachings,

[10:43]

upholding the teachings. I suppose that means living what you say, what you're teaching. That's how I understand it. Protecting the teachings and being examples of the possibility of that condition called unexcelled in attainment. They're also revered because they maintained the manner of listening. That means listening to the suffering of all beings in the world, not turning away to being free or liberated from suffering and abandoning all of us, but listening, staying with the world of samsara, of suffering. One of the central practices in the Buddhist tradition is this acknowledgement, remembering,

[11:47]

turning to the ancestors, because, of course, the tradition is about that which is past, literally mind to mind and body to body, from one practitioner to another. And when one begins to realize the degree to which this is a literal and exact description of how it happens, the longevity and breadth and depth of the tradition is a marvel. So these days I have been thinking a lot about those who have gone before, because now, for a few days, Theravada Rinpoche has joined that crowd, those who have gone before. So every morning I bow to the ancestors.

[12:50]

We all do, here at Green Gulch in the morning, upon the recitation of the names of the Buddhas and ancestors. But throughout many schools of Buddhism, this practice is followed as a way of acknowledging and remembering and appreciating who has gone before. And I think one of the things that happens for many of us is as we recite the names of the Buddhas and ancestors, as we do bows with the names we recite, wondering, well, who are they? What were they like? What did they teach? When we do the full moon ceremony, we call up, we refer to, we remember the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. We begin with the seven Buddhas before Buddha. So we acknowledge that there are those

[13:53]

who went before Shakyamuni Buddha as well. There's a lovely verse in this prayer to the elders that goes, I bow to him at whose incomparably beautiful golden form one cannot gaze enough. One face, two hands, sitting in full lotus, one hand gestures to the earth, the other gestures meditation. Pray, bless us. Maintain our teacher's life and spread the doctrine. So this is of course a reference to Shakyamuni Buddha who is described as having the marks of a Buddha, one of them being this beautiful golden glowing body. I have a particular association with Shakyamuni Buddha and Theravada,

[15:00]

because for me the Bodhisattva vow, the vow to seek enlightenment for the sake of all beings with the possibility even in this lifetime came alive for me in knowing Theravada. Such was his inspiration, his capacity for inspiration. So I'd like to tell you a little bit about him because I think that he is an example of possibility which I think the whole tradition challenges us to consider seriously. That is, to pick up the possibility of enlightenment for the sake of all beings in our lives, each of us. I don't know about you, but I know for me for many, many years I always thought that was a beautiful story to read about,

[16:02]

but it was like it was happening somewhere else, some thousands of years ago, not in this lifetime. There is a great ancestor named Atisha who lived in the 11th century, was a Bengali, is said to have taken Buddhism to Tibet. He carried a particular kind of stupa on his back and whenever some great realization would happen for him or he'd meet a great practitioner or be in some sacred place, he'd take the stupa off his back and put it down on the ground and do prostrations. So there's a particular kind of stupa which is like a picture of Atisha. And he's in the lineage that leads to Tsongkhapa who is the great reformer, practitioner, great philosopher, remarkable being who lived in the late 14th and early 15th century

[17:05]

and was the reformer of the Kadampa lineage which then under Tsongkhapa came to be the lineage in which His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Tarotuku are practitioners. Atisha has written a wonderful book which I recommend to all of you called The Lamp Illuminating the Path to Enlightenment. And it is in many ways a source text for the tradition that we follow here at Green Gulch. So Tarotuku is in this lineage that looks back to Atisha and to Tsongkhapa. Tarotuku was born in 1925 in eastern Tibet in a place called Markham. He said there was a village near where he was born called Tara and that was where his name came from. He was enthroned as a high incarnate lama at Dregbong Monastery when he was six.

[18:11]

So he became a monk at six. We had some very interesting and lively debates last year during a retreat I did with him in which I said, how come if you've been a monk since you were six you're such an authority about bliss? Bliss which is described as something we all know about because we all know about bliss through the orgasm that we experience in sexual union. And we had some pretty lively conversations about how does this celibate monk for a life know about such matters? I'm not quite sure how he convinced me that he really did know what he was talking about, but he did. At the same time he convinced me that he was absolutely rigorous about maintaining his vows of all sorts including celibacy.

[19:17]

I'm a little embarrassed now when I think about the debate. He completed the training which leads to what we would probably describe as a kind of Ph.D. to the tenth power called the Geshe Larampa degree with highest honors in 1955. And he then did subsequent studies and training at Guto Tantric College and Monastery until 1959 when he fled from Tibet and went to India. And with the reestablishment of the Guto Tantric College and Monastery in India, first in Dalhousie and later in Bhandala up in northeastern India, he was the abbot of the monastery for three terms

[20:20]

which is very unusual in that tradition. Usually someone is abbot only for one term of three years. But because it was a very fragile time for the Tibetans and for that particular monastic sangha, he was the abbot for that long time, nearly ten years, and is recognized as being a significant factor or element in the successful establishment of this great monastery, college and monastery. In the beginning stages of their exile in India, the Tibetans were put to work building roads in India, which for any of us who have been in India know what that's about. It means baskets with hammers, and you crack the rocks into little pieces to make something we would call gravel. And then you put that on the roads. It's all handwork. It's dusty. It's hot. These were people who were used to the high, clear air of the Himalayas,

[21:26]

and they were now down in the tropics of the subcontinent, dying by the thousands. And so His Holiness the Dalai Lama asked Thay Rinpoche if he would go from one road crew to another and attend to the spiritual life of the Tibetan people during these very difficult times when they were first finding their way in exile. So he was known as the Road Gang Lama. Sometimes when I would look at him seated on the high seat in his monastery with all of his regalia, and I would think of him as the Road Gang Lama and sort of chuckle. And of course, many of the Tibetans who were children at the time were very impressed by him. They remember his great kindness. And so when they reached adulthood, they would come to him and say, Please, I want to be ordained. I want to enter your monastery.

[22:27]

I want you to train me. He had that kind of impact on them. He was subsequently appointed to be the abbot of the Mahayana Monastery in Bodhgaya, which is the site where the Buddha was enlightened, where Shakyamuni Buddha was enlightened, and was the abbot at that monastery up until the time of his death. And he was, in December, given the great honor of being one of the two so-called prime ministers. In the Tibetan system, there's a prime minister of the eastern region and one of the western region. And they take turns then ascending to the position of Ganden Tri Rinpoche, which is like being sort of like the pope. I'm not quite sure how you describe that different from the Dalai Lama, but it's a different position. And so Tara Rinpoche was given that great honor in December, called the shardze.

[23:28]

So he was the prime minister of the eastern region. He was one of the first Lamas to come to the west. He went to England in 1977 with a group of monks from the Guta Monastery. And one of the things that made him quite remarkable, I think, for those of us who had a chance to take teachings from him here in this country, is that he was very easily able to drop all of his cultural trappings. For any of us who've been around the Tibetan scene, we know there's lots of this kind of bowing. You know, the Tibetans come in before a high Lama and they all look like they're doing some form of groveling. It doesn't read for them the way it reads for us. And Tara Rinpoche, I think, very quickly understood that all that bowing and scraping stuff should be left in India or Tibet.

[24:33]

And he was just very, as my daughter would put it, very regular. In fact, for many of us, we had no idea that he was this big deal that he is in the Tibetan scene. What we knew was that he had this shining countenance, that he was the demonstration of all of the attributes that we study about and aspire to. In addition to being an incarnation, a reincarnate Lama, he was also, by virtue of his own training and practice, a quite realized being in this lifetime, without any reference to any prior lifetimes. And so, quite remarkable, because he brought together these various strands of the Buddhist tradition as it has flowered in the Tibetan scene. I first met him in the winter of 1985 in Bodh Gaya.

[25:40]

And my first memory of him was sitting in his room, in a chair, being the western fly on the wall, while many Tibetans came to pay their respects. And Rinpoche would every once in a while fish a tin can out from under his bed where he was sitting and offer me a piece of Tibetan cheese, which would be a great treat, but which would be so hard that it would take me an hour or an hour and a half to chew a very small piece of cheese. It's a little bit like figuring out how to chew a rock. But I was quite clear that he was giving me something that in his eyes was a great delicacy. So between the hard cheese and the cups of buttered salted tea, I thought, oy! And I thought he was a nice guy. But I didn't speak or understand any Tibetan.

[26:42]

I really didn't have much sense of who I was with, except that I had a very strong response at the level of a heart response to him. He was very open and extremely kind. He basically, he and his attendant, Kungala, took care of me and the group of people that I was with, including Bob Thurman, fed us and took care of us during that time when there were many pilgrims in Bodhgaya. And I think because of Rinpoche's great kindness, I managed not to get deathly ill and to receive great teachings at that time from the Dalai Lama on the great text by Shantideva on the Bodhisattva path. So the following June, Rinpoche came here and did a teaching with Kadagiri Roshi. Thar Rinpoche did teachings on the graduated path in the morning and Kadagiri Roshi gave teachings on Zen in the afternoon.

[27:47]

And Bob Thurman ranted and raved about the Buddhist tradition and the messianic opportunities for the West at night. And we had a very good time. And that was really the first time I had any real access to Thar Rinpoche as a teacher, because he didn't speak any English. And at that time he didn't understand very much English, although I suspect now he understood a lot more than he let on to. And I remember in particular a morning lecture he gave at the end of that teaching on the Heart Sutra, which literally blew my mind, because I felt like the Heart Sutra opened up in some way that I could understand in hearing his commentary that morning. So that was in 1986.

[28:49]

Then he came again in 1988 and gave teachings on Samatha and Vipassana. And that was again, I think for many of us, a very inspiring time. And I remember during that visit when he was here for a longer period of time and he met with a number of people who practice here. And after that visit, on three different occasions, he talked to me about how much we needed to study more. I actually wrote down some quotes from my notes from my third interview with him on this occasion, because he was really taking me to task on behalf of all of us. Kind of, you know, like that. He said, in a center like Zen Center where the Heart Sutra is chanted daily, we must study it. We must be prepared to debate with the scientists,

[29:54]

otherwise this great tradition will not last. He said, you chant the Heart Sutra very beautifully, but chanting it beautifully is not enough. And he was somewhat scandalized, I think, when he would ask various of us if we had read this or that commentary on the Heart Sutra, and we would say, Commentary? There are commentaries? He said, I'm not impressed. He said, the only real challenge to science, and I think what he was really referring to was the scientific formulation of the philosophical system based on materialism. So the only real challenge is coming from Buddhism, and it is the great Buddhist philosophers who are able to hold the conversation. I think the language is very interesting. The great figures in Tibetan Buddhism didn't just meditate in caves. They started monasteries, they gave lectures,

[30:59]

they wrote commentaries. He said, we must do that too. He then turned to me and he said, Well, have you started writing your commentary? And I sort of gulped. So I remember that. There's some way in which his challenge, if you will, comes up for me now that he has passed over. Because the time of studying with him in particular is now concluded. There are, of course, other great teachers. There are many great texts and commentaries. The path has not at all come to an end because this great practitioner and teacher has passed over. But there's a way in which his passing brings up for me some challenge for us to practice to not waste time.

[31:59]

You know, it says there's a verse on the board that we hit to announce meditation to practice as if our head is on fire. So there's a way in which I guess I feel my head is on fire and I feel the fire a little bit more intensely than ever. A friend of mine said to me this morning, You know, when a great teacher passes, great blessings abound for all of us and we get caught in clinging to the form of the great teacher that is in the phenomenal world. I was very grateful for her reminder. There's a quote from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu which I have been thinking about a lot the last few weeks.

[33:04]

Because for me it describes, it describes Therma Boucher and describes several of the great teachers that I have been blessed to study with. The master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die and he has nothing left to hold on to. No illusions in his mind. No resistances in his body. He doesn't think about his actions. They flow from the core of his being. He holds nothing back from life. Therefore he is ready for death as a man is ready for sleep after a good day's work. At the end of this prayer of reverence to you holy elders

[34:08]

there are these three verses. May we be blessed by the superior unexcelled teacher who ripens fortunate disciples, completes two accumulations, accomplishes the deeds of the past, present and future conquerors, that is conquerors of all that binds us, all that leads to suffering, and is not different from their qualities, in other words is the embodiment of those qualities. May we be blessed by the great holy elders who work for the sake of living beings, protecting the doctrine as long as there is existence, maintaining the manner of listeners with the compassion of past, present and future conquerors and their spiritual sons and daughters. May the day be blessed. May the night be blessed.

[35:11]

May the midday be blessed too. May the blessings of the three jewels bless us throughout the day and the night. So with these words may we dedicate our practices and our dedication to cultivation to the happiness of all beings, to the cessation of suffering for all beings, to that happiness which is devoid of suffering. May we live our lives free of too much attachment and too much aversion. And may we dedicate our intention to live as awake as we can be to the safe passing over and remembrance of this great friend and teacher,

[36:14]

Tara Tulkar Rinpoche. May our intention equally penetrate every being and pace. With the true merit of Buddha's way.

[36:37]

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