March 27, 2007
Confluences
This week the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, the source of most of my insights about Buddhism, is giving a series of talks at Nalanda West about analytical meditation. I have been taking classes at his center and reading his books for almost two years now; this week is the first time I’ve actually heard him teach in person. It has been moving and quite wonderful. There is an ease and naturalness to his presentation that is thoroughly disarming–he presents himself as totally uninterested in glamour, and laces his talks with self-deprecating humor and earthy examples–tonight it was the story of him listening to the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue in a monastery in Sikkim in the 70s (“I guess we were hoping to be rescued from the monastery”).
But underneath all that is a deep and pervasive wisdom. And inspiration as well: when he said, tonight, “we keep telling ourselves same lies over and over and over again until we actually believe them: that we will last forever, that our experience is solid and permanent, that our concepts really exist.” In the midst of a somewhat tangled set of life circumstances just now, these words were deeply meaningful.
I have to give myself a modest pat on the back for showing up for these teachings, and not running screaming from the room. To sit still and listen with an open heart and genuine pleasure to any spiritual teacher takes some doing (this has been a good year–Cynthia Bourgeault is another success story for the mystical Christian side of my brain).
The occasion for Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche’s talks is Nitartha Institute, a lovely and in-depth exploration of Buddhist philosophy that is now most conveniently being offered a few blocks from my house. This is not the year for me to attend but I hope to do so another time. I’m really amazed by the Nitartha Institute’s vision: to provide a context for traditional Tibetan Buddhist scholastic philosophy to be taught in a Western context, in a way that makes sense to Westerners. This vision will take time to unfold (it’s been going for eleven years already), but as the DPR said the other night, “I’m a conversative”.
Sometimes my quixotic pursuit of the spirituality of Gregorian chant seems foolish and pointless. But maybe there is a way in which this work can sprout its own roots and grow, just like these beautiful Buddhist projects springing up all over.
Anyway, I just keep studying and growing and listening (most recently also to Peter Brown’s fantastic Rise of Western Christendom, which is opening up huge new vistas of understanding about the context of Gregorian chant–more on this later, I hope).