![]() ![]() In addition to Das’s helpers and assistant teachers, there were 30-some students on the retreat, male and female, old and young. Yeah, or omniscient, Das said, that’s a problem too, no one is omniscient or infallible. I said I thought we should get rid of the idea that being enlightened makes you morally infallible. It turned out he did this often during Q&A. He fears for the future of Tibetan Buddhism. He replied that scandals involving spiritual leaders aren’t unique to Buddhism, but they trouble him. I asked what he thought about the latest report of a prominent Buddhist leader accused of sexually abusing women. On the first night, Das led us in meditation, talked for a while and took questions. That technique, like the chanting, eased me into pleasant, trance-like states. When we meditated, opened-eyed and open-mouthed, he urged us in a hypnotic murmur to let go of our cramped, fearful, grasping self and become our true self, which is big as the sky. It was a funny but effective way to get us to loosen up and chant along. When he chanted Tibetan mantras or prayers, his voice swerved from a bass rumble to a squeaky falsetto. Buddha, he explained, is within you, so any Buddha outside you isn’t real. He liked the Zen aphorism, If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him. When he listed the four or six or whatever precepts or pillars of Dzogchen, he invariably forgot one, perhaps to let us know we shouldn’t worry too much about doctrine. His mother, he likes to say, calls him the Deli Lama. ![]() He is a kidder, who pokes fun at Buddhism, other teachers and himself. According to Dzogchen, we are all already enlightened, we’re just too dumb to realize it.ĭas promotes Dzogchen through his books and the Dzogchen Center, which he founded in 1991. You become the cosmic self underlying your flawed, individual, illusory self. Dzogchen’s meditations, chants, breathing techniques and doctrines are intended to nudge you toward enlightenment, the extraordinary way of seeing, and being, that Buddha supposedly achieved. He eventually became a teacher, or Lama, specializing in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He is a few years older than me, and like many youths of my generation he headed East in search of answers. A big man with a Buddha belly, Das is a self-described Jewish kid from Long Island, originally named Jeffrey Miller, who still speaks with a New Yawk accent. I taught my son and daughter how to ride bikes on the grounds of the Garrison Institute when it was just an abandoned Catholic monastery, and I swam with my dog, Merlin, in a nearby spot on the Hudson.Ī spiritually savvy colleague, Lindsey, recommended the retreat’s leader, Lama Surya Das. Coincidentally, I lived in Garrison, the hamlet after which the institute is named, from 1990 until 2009, when my marriage broke up. The retreat was organized by the Dzogchen Center, a Buddhist organization based in Cambridge, Mass., and took place at the Garrison Institute, a contemplative center on the Hudson River an hour’s drive north of New York City. As I told Julie, a teacher who advised me not to write during the retreat, I’m not sure what happens to me until I write about it. I’m still trying to make sense of it, but I’m going to take a stab at describing it, if only for my own sake. So I recently put my skepticism to the test by going on a weeklong silent Buddhist retreat, which my pro-Buddhism friends Lisa and Bob argued was my moral obligation. I’ve been hard on Buddhism over the years (see for example my critique of the recent bestseller Why Buddhism Is True). ![]()
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