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Discussion (continued)
Participant: I know what happened sort of, but as you say, you can't really know. There are a lot of things that I've heard and I think, yuck! But there's one thing that sticks in my mind almost every time that the Vajra Regent comes up, and I would like for one or both of you to comment on this. And that is the fact that the 16th Karmapa, I believe, said to the Vajra Regent, "The Kagyü lineage is in your hands." Based on some of what's occurring in Shambhala, I think about that a lot. I would like to hear what either of you have to say about that.
LLR: Well, the Vajra Regent was so in love with the 16th Karmapa. If anybody was ever around during any of the visits and the encounters, I'm sure they witnessed that he was nearly beside himself the whole time he was in the presence of the Karmapa, except for that certain call to duty which made him try to hold something together and be useful. [Lady Rich laughs, joined by others] And so, because of that, as you can imagine, there was just a lot of non-verbal communication, along with everything else, between them. It's probably, I'm just guessing, from being part of the atmosphere of the time, that it was really a comment about the Vidyadhara's amazing accomplishments. The vast work, the whole conquering or planting and flowering in the West of the dharma, evidenced by all of us sitting here, together, and realizing the way in which the Vidyadhara relied on the Regent to accomplish that. So he's the vanguard — I mean literally, historically, one of the vanguards. So that may be what the Karmapa was saying. [To Patrick] Do you have anything else, some specific knowledge?
PS: Well, we used to say to the Vajra Regent near the end of his life, “You're the last old-fashioned man. You're the one who is not afraid of devotion. You're the one who actually leaned in to the Vidyadhara's beatings.” In the same way that Naropa leaned into his relationship to Tilopa, the Vajra Regent leaned into his relationship with the Vidyadhara. Both when the Vidyadhara was alive, but also after he passed into Parinirvana. He kept leaning into reality. The Vajra Regent had no apologies for his neurosis hanging out all over the place. His devotion and his single-minded, relentless pride in being what he called a Kagyü pig, a mahamudra junkie, a devotee of Vajrayogini, was awesome. He didn't hold back. Tilo didn't hold back. Naro didn't hold back. Marpa didn't hold back. Mila definitely did not hold back. The Vajra Regent definitely did not hold back. And as we've seen since his death, the whole guru principle has become slightly politically incorrect, and the process of devotion, the process of the teacher-student relationship as it matures through a devotional relationship, has become suspect …
Participant: Suspect by who?
PS: By many psychotherapists [laughter] quite frankly.
I think the Vajra Regent held the Kagyü lineage as his innermost jewel, his innermost heart transmission from the Vidyadhara. And I think he saw the 16th Karmapa and the Vidyadhara as one transmissional entity. And if you review the forward that the Vidyadhara wrote to Buddha In The Palm Of Your Hand, then you'll get some clues, I think, as to what the Karmapa was talking about.
Participant: I wanted to speak about my love for the Vajra Regent and my appreciation for his teachings and his friendship. He actually married my second husband and me. He was a special friend of the Vajra Regent's and a golf buddy, so I had the privilege of going on a couple of trips with the Vajra Regent. One thing about him was that he could not help but teach. Everywhere we went, whether it was an airport, restaurant, or wherever we were – on the beach— he was always teaching and people would notice that something was going on with our group that was vibrant, and they would come hang out around it. So, I just wanted to preface my remarks with that, and also my deep love and appreciation for Lady Rich, whose teachings I've also benefited from a great deal. Some of the things she has said in her teachings, I, in my teachings, I just say them verbatim [laughter]. Sorry! I try to give you credit whenever ... [Laughter] Such as, “Your heart is broken now, it was broken in the past and it will be broken in the future.” I love that one particularly. [Laughter] I do not know you, Mr. Sweeney, although I trust the wisdom of my friends who take you to be their teacher, and so I feel that I have an open mind about that and would like to get to know you better. But the thing I really wanted to talk about [laughter] was that I'm … [pause] my heart is broken because at the time of the Vajra Regent's sickness and death, our community, our society, was not in a position to allow him to share that with us, the highest teachings of Buddhism. And I will always be heartbroken about that. I would like at some time in the future for people who were around him in those days to share some of those stories with us, and share things about the moment of his death. I thank you all very much.
PS: Thank you. [Applause]
PS: This is something that Lady Rich and I have talked a lot about. When I visited Dechen Chöling recently, I was able to spend time with Acharya Jeremy Hayward and his wife Pat Hayward, and meet with some of the European community. This point was really the most important thing for me to communicate. Unfortunately, because of the circumstances near the end of the Vajra Regent's life when this controversy broke, the actual final process of letting go, of dying, that the Vajra Regent went through, was not available to the larger sangha. It was available to some of us who served him through the very last days of his life. Many things happened during the year and a half of estrangement. His process kept unfolding. His realization kept, in a sense, shining through, as his body began to fail, as the HIV virus began to completely destroy his capacity to fight off disease. Then his realization increased and his honesty about his own path, and his honesty about his devotion to the Vidyadhara, flourished.
This has been a very painful thing, really. I feel that the Shambhala sangha at large would benefit greatly from knowing how the Vajra Regent died. As Jamgon Kongtrul said, the most important moment of a Buddhist's life is the moment of death. And the Vajra Regent met it victoriously. Not only that, the process of dying allowed him to see his own confusion — in particular the issue of not being able to fully and clearly distinguish between absolute and relative truth. There is something that happens when you sit in a seat like this. As we get higher and higher, something happens to us internally, in the sense that we can confuse absolute and relative.
Some people accuse me and other people in Ojai of being some sort of crazy wisdom Vajra Regent fundamentalists, who say that everything he did was perfect. But he himself acknowledged in the last months of his life that there had been confusion. That didn't make him the devil. He wasn't evil. There was a process of unfolding that was going on. There was a process of insight that kept building right up until the very last moment when he went into a coma. Thank you for asking that question. This is one of the projects that we are working on, which is to say, collecting the stories, collecting the anecdotes, collecting basically a chronology of what happened and how he met his death.
When the Vajra Regent died in San Francisco, he was brought to the San Francisco Dharmadhatu and he manifested something quite extraordinary. He entered into what Lama Lodro and another of the Tibetan lamas in San Francisco at the time felt was a very powerful samadhi. As his main student, it was part of my responsibility to check his heart to feel the temperature of his heart center, and to witness this process that he was going through. He kept breaking through time barriers that the Tibetan lamas were setting as to when they felt the samadhi would break. It got to a point of amazement. They couldn't believe what was happening, that his heart center was still warm. He was not exhibiting the typical signs of the consciousness leaving the body, where the blood comes out of the nostrils and it comes out of the ears and it starts to leak out of various orifices. His body remained intact without any artificial support for three and a half days. At a certain point when it was time to go for the cremation, Lama Lodro said, ”You must supplicate him to come out of samadhi.” Although I didn’t have any idea what that meant, I said those words to the Vajra Regent. Within two hours Lama Lodro determined that the samadhi had broken and his heart center became cooler and then bodily fluids began to emerge.
I'm not trying to sell anything particularly; this is what happened. Some people in this room didn't know that all this happened. And for me, as the Vajra Regent's student, this is disturbing. That people who have a heart connection to him don't actually have access to what he exhibited at the end of his life is very sad. And it doesn't mean that the moral ambiguity of the difficult issues that occurred in his path go away. No one's saying that here. No one's saying that. It does not have to be an either/or situation. The Vajra Regent was a highly realized person; he was a pioneer in terms of bringing tantra to the West; and as a pioneer, a trailblazer, he ended up getting hit with all the arrows. We can hold both of those situations. We have the maturity at this point to hold both of those situations. He made mistakes, and yet those mistakes, those errors, became the basis for him to then go further on the path. That to me is what needs to be acknowledged about the Vajra Regent. His path didn't end at a certain point. It kept going. And his realization kept unfolding. And his errors, they were difficult. But they fueled his path. So thank you for asking that question.
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