My Eight Main Teachers — part 3
Alright let’s leave Dhardo Rimpoche, and come on to Chattrul Samye Dorje — maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe not. I met him in 1956 when he was spending a few days in Kalimpong. A Sikkhamese friend of mine who was a staunch follower of Nyingmapa Buddhism urged me to go and meet him. He was a very famous lama indeed. He wasn’t very old, he was only about 35 at the time, and he was not a tulku, he was not an incarnate lama — and he had quite a reputation for eccentric behaviour and eccentric utterances. He was a follower of the Nyingmapa tradition, but he wasn’t a monk, though he lived like a monk at least at that time. Well, when I asked this friend of mine whether he was a monk, the friend said: Well he may be a sramanera
, that’s a novice monk. He didn’t wear monastic robes, he wore a sort of old red cloak lined with sheepskin, and not much else. He had a very unprepossessing appearance. I must say he was the ugliest of my teachers. A very unattractive appearance. No charisma. If you passed him in the Bazaar, you’d think he was some sort of mulateer or small shopkeeper or even a cut-throat of some kind. He didn’t look at all attractive. Anyway for some time I’d been thinking I should ask for tantric initiation — my reasons for doing that is a long story, which I’m not going to go into now. And well, I couldn’t perhaps find a better person than him. There were very few incarnate lamas around in Kalimpong at that time. So I asked him for an initiation and he said to come back the following day. And I came back the following day, and after a little discussion, he said I’m going to give you the Green Tara initiation. Many great pandits in Tibet have been given this practice
. Though what he meant by that I wasn’t quite sure. Anyway he gave me this Green Tara practice, explained it, and that’s one of the practices I’ve done ever since. And thereafter I met him quite a number of times. It wasn’t easy to meet him, he was always wandering around, he wouldn’t tell anyone what his movements were going to be: he just upped and off, never took anything with him. And, well, he was altogether quite a strange, mysterious character.
I remember once I was with him in Darjeeling and he’d just been to Nepal, and he’d been visiting the ancient stupas; and he told me that when he came to one of these stupas he put his hand inside and he pulled out a handful of ribus — which are sort of relics — in the form of very tiny pearls. He pulled a handful out to show me. I looked at them and he said Yes, that’s what I found
. He was talking about these ,em>ribus in a strange way, that I couldn’t understand at all, trying to communicate something. It was also he who named the Triyana Vardhana Vihara, which I acquired shortly afterwards. He actually named it before I got it, before I knew I was going to get it. He told me &You’re going to have a vihara, and I shall give it a name
. At that stage I didn’t know I wasn’t going to have a vihara, certainly didn’t have the money for a vihara, But he said You’re going to have a vihara, and this is what you should call it, Triyana Vardhana Vihara
. And he composed a little verse for me, in the course of which he gave the vihara its name, the Triyana Vardhana Vihara, in Tibetan. He is by the way still alive, though it’s very difficult to keep track of him. One or two of our friends have sighted him, but he’s very elusive, he’s always wandering. He’s no longer a monk if he ever was one, he’s married. In fact he has two wives, all three living together apparently and moving around together. One of the people whom he met or who met him some years ago, was Thomas Merton — you might have heard of Thomas Merton — and Thomas Merton has written that of all the lamas he met in India — and he met quite a few including the Dalai Lama — Chattrul Samye Dorje impressed him most. And he certainly was a very remarkable man. In fact there were depths in him that were very difficult to fathom. So he also was one of my teachers. Well, still is.