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Shambhala Mountain Center
Redfeather Lakes, CO
August 12, 2006
In August 2005, the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche gave the first Rigden Abhisheka at Shambhala Mountain Center. Those attending the Abhisheka were invited to gather with Mr. Patrick Sweeney and Lady Lila Rich, who were also attending the Abhisheka at the Sakyong’s invitation. President Richard Reoch arranged an informal reception, calling it a “Meet & Greet” event, anticipating 50 to 60 people. Approximately 250 people arrived at the event, which was held in the Sacred Studies Hall. The original format was abandoned, and Mr. Sweeney, Lady Rich and Richard Reoch addressed the gathering and then opened up the floor for questions.
Remarks by Richard Reoch, President of Shambhala International; Patrick Sweeney, Dharma Heir of the Vajra Regent and President of Satdharma; and Lady Lila Rich, wife of the Vajra Regent
RICHARD REOCH: It gives me great pleasure to welcome all of you who have come to meet Lady Lila Rich and Mr. Patrick Sweeney. Originally we had the idea that this would be a small cocktail reception environment. You'd all be swirling around and some people would come up and chat with Lady Rich and Mr. Sweeney and after about 20 minutes, I would say a few words. It would all be very nice. Now I am attempting to demonstrate pliancy of mind in relation to changes of causes and conditions! [Acknowledges the hall full of people sitting on the floor facing Lady Rich and Mr. Sweeney.] So please don't mistake these very simple remarks for a talk.
The word that came to my mind when I saw all of you gathering here is "longing." [Applause] That was the root text. I suppose that now you'd like the commentary. [Laughter] First of all, I think that the sense of longing that we all have has been heightened to an extraordinary extent by the amazing energy of this past week. It was an extraordinary opportunity to sit in the shrine room on the second day of the Rigden Abhisheka, and to see the Sakyong kindly giving a talk, when it was clear he was mainly working with the elemental forces, as his father did. That was followed by the extraordinarily tender reading of the Dharmaraja Guru Yoga, an expression from the Sakyong’s heart of the inseparability of all the manifestations of our lineage. Certainly that is what karmically has drawn all of us to this unique event. So we have this profound substrata of longing, which is almost pre-conscious. I think there is also a sense of belonging to an extraordinarily large family. We could call it the family of the Mukpos but I think it is also the family of the Rigdens, the family of all those who were karmically drawn to the Vidyadhara when he crossed the mountains of the Himalayas to plant the Dharma in the West, and those who continue to be drawn to the vision of Shambhala. Khandro Rinpoche once gave a talk in which she asked how many people were new to Shambhala. Only a few people put their hands up, and she said, "The rest of you are wrong - you couldn't possibly be at this talk unless you had been in Shambhala for lifetimes."
As with any family which is bound together in a deep way through longing and aspiration, it's inevitable that there will be times of strife, confusion and conflict. That happens in the most enlightened families as well as the most ordinary families. It seems to me that if Shambhala is to be anything more than a brief experiment like a cult, if it is to go beyond the ordinary history of so many religious or spiritual groups, large or small, then we have to be able to find a way to hold deep, genuine, heartfelt, even irreconcilable levels of disagreement and conflict, and not lose the profound heart connection that binds us to each other. I cannot actually think of anything else that we are meant to accomplish.
PATRICK SWEENEY: E ma. [Applause]
RR: That is what brings us all here together tonight—you [gesturing to Mr. Sweeney and Lady Rich], the leadership of the Satdharma Center, your wonderful decision to be here, and all that you bring with you—to this extraordinary event where what binds us together is far more important, far more significant, than anything that appears temporarily to separate any of us. I think that is proven by the simple fact that not everybody who wants to can even get into this room. [Laughter] So with those very extemporaneous words I'd like to invite both Patrick and Lady Rich to share any thoughts they have with the people gathered here.
PS: Perhaps we could begin with a bow. [All bow]
Initially I want to begin by thanking Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Lady Diana Mukpo for hosting us here. I also want to thank Richard Reoch for being the person within Shambhala who exerted himself over the last eight months to bring a process of rapprochement or reconciliation to a point of departure. It was quite a miraculous journey and sitting in this space with all of you, it's very, very poignant for both Lady Rich and myself.
On August 25th, it will be fifteen years since the Vajra Regent died. Things have been difficult. There's no way around it. Things have been difficult. As many of you know, there was what one might call a samaya earthquake, a huge rupture in the fabric of trust in our community. In a sense, coming back feels very good; but the wound is still here, still open.
Going up to the Vajra Regent's Stupa site a couple of days ago, I just sat there nakedly, contemplating all of the various projections and agendas that people have laid on this situation over the last fifteen years, all of the various conceptualizations and elaborate logics about who is responsible for the problem. Is it possible for us to somehow conceptually organize our way out of this dilemma?
It was with that same contemplation that we embarked upon a rapprochement process. Richard and I spent many, many, hours on the telephone. I actually learned how to work a computer [Laughter] to get through this rapprochement process. It turns out that, without any prior knowledge, I bought the exact same computer that Richard has.
What we found, and what I'm sitting with right here, right now, is the fact that the conceptual rapprochement process hasn’t worked out so well. Big surprise! [Laughter] As the Vajra Regent put it at the time of the great upheaval, “Any attempt to legislate devotion, any attempt to legislate what we feel with the entirety of our being, fails.” The attempt to conceptually orient our hearts can only fail. And yet, we want to communicate. We want to be able to hold as much of the truth as we possibly can.
One could say that absolute truth is very easy in our lineage. We talk about it as ordinary mind, or thamel gyi shepa. We talk about devotion as the means of realizing absolute truth. Trungpa Rinpoche was the embodiment of absolute truth. He was the Buddha. He was the Padmasambhava of our age. And yet there are so many different relative interpretations of what happened during and after his time with us, so many different relative emanations.
What has been poignant for me during this Abhisheka has been the recognition of continuity. Trungpa Rinpoche's mind, the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche's mind, you can't say they're one, and you can’t say they're two. There's continuity. For most of the people in this room, or at least the people that I know, there is another interesting manifestation of continuity, which is that many of us saw the Vajra Regent as an inseparable spiritual entity with Trungpa Rinpoche. We saw the Vajra Regent as a manifestation of Trungpa Rinpoche's heart.
The key to any true harmony is for all of us to restore our samaya, to truly return to the sacred bondage that we experienced with Trungpa Rinpoche, and to simply relax further and further into that. The rapprochement process began for me at the feet of both Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. They instructed me that the most compassionate thing that I can do is to exert myself to heal the ruptured samaya in Trungpa Rinpoche's community. They told me that no matter how much or little influence my work might have, no matter how much or little merit or karmic momentum the Vajra Regent planted in of me in terms of relating to the dharma, the pith essence of all of it should go towards healing the samaya of all of Trungpa Rinpoche's students.
When I met Richard Reoch I knew it was time to throw myself into it yet again .[Laughter] He was new enough not to know much [Laughter] and smart enough to think there was an answer. Over and over again Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche's voice rang in my mind: “Erring and erring, we find the unerring path.” Mistake after mistake leads us to the unmistaken way.
This mishap lineage is a very curious thing to be part of. As many of you here know, I love the Vajra Regent. I fell in love with him when I first met him and as my relationship with him matured and the initial emotional/devotional projections started to turn into serving him and, actually, doing a lot of things that I didn't particularly want to do, I began to see him not only as an emanation of Trungpa Rinpoche but as a Buddha in his own right.
I came into Trungpa Rinpoche’s community of students at a very unique time, the time between when Trungpa Rinpoche was both Sakyong and Vajra Master and when the current Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche took on his own responsibilities. Some of you here were in that unique graduating class of people who were left in the gap where what occurred was as a result of the tendrel of the Vajra Regent's relationship with Trungpa Rinpoche and the Kagyü and Nyingma masters who wanted to bless and ensure the continuity of Trungpa Rinpoche's lineage. The Vajra Regent was encouraged to take on students, to give abhisheka, and to take on the karma of his students. There were many difficult situations that are still reverberating around his sexual conduct and his manifestation of power and charisma within his teaching position. There were many different opinions. I know many of the people in this room had very different experiences. For me, it came down to realizing I was in the proverbial bamboo tube. There was only one way to go. I'm still in that bamboo tube.
That's the quality of samaya that I think is the only way that we're ever going to have a true rapprochement. We could simply acknowledge that Trungpa Rinpoche offered us many different gates through which we could enter into his heart. The Vajra Regent was one of those profound gates. Like all gates, it was imperfect from the relative point of view. And yet, the process of going through that particular gate, the process of receiving transmission from the Vajra Regent and being in the mandala of transmission with him, was the most glorious thing that happened to me in my life. As members of a vajrayana community, we must learn to hold in our minds the ambiguity of simultaneous conflicting subjectivities. We must learn to hold that within the quality of this unified Vajra family, this unified Rigden family. I could say a lot more but I'll stop for now. If you would like to have some conversation after Lady Rich speaks, then I'm more than open to that. [Applause]
LADY LILA RICH: Unlike my esteemed friend, Mr. Sweeney, I don't usually come prepared to be prepared [Laughter] with such well-structured thoughts and words. But your faces are very pleasing to see. All this week I've been feasting on the sight of old friends and also on the scene in general, the vast population in the great tent. I’m rejoicing at the existence of such a scene. People are practicing, people are working, people are learning. The Sakyong is thriving, thanks to all of your energy coming toward his work and toward each other.
Even if you've never met me you can probably understand that most of my somewhat mature adult life was spent at the feet of Trungpa Rinpoche and at the side of the Vajra Regent. In fact, I got so accustomed to that reality that “parachuting out” for a time, so to speak, could be quite instructive. [Laughter]
I want to make only one really simple public statement. I hold no ill will or enmity toward anyone, no matter how angry they may have become with my husband. I intend never to have such darkness in my heart, because I believe in the path. I believe that the path of non-aggression is the only way. If there’s anything I can do to serve in any way my guru and my vajra brothers and sisters, I will always try to do that to the best of my ability. [Applause]
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