My Eight Main Teachers — part 8
Alright — I’m rather hurrying because there’s still quite a lot of ground to cover — we come lastly to Yogi Chen, C.N. Chen. He was born in China, and had spent quite a few years in eastern Tibet and when he was in eastern Tibet he was a disciple of Jamyang Khyentse Rimpoche, when Jamyang Khyentse was a comparatively young man. And Yogi Chen had practised both Vajrayana and Ch’an — I must say he didn’t have much time for Zen, he was firmly convinced that in Japan Ch’an had been thoroughly corrupted and Zen wasn’t worth bothering with, one had to concentrate on Ch’an. Ch’an was the real thing, the original Chinese thing, so to speak. Anyway, that’s by the way. He was told me that when he was in China, he read the entire Chinese Pitaka twice. That’s a bigger feat than you might think. There’s 1656, I think it is, separate works in the Chinese Tripitaka, and he’d read them all; indeed he’d read the whole collection through twice. Quite a feat in itself.
I came in contact with him in the late fifties when he was living in Kalimpong. He hadn’t been in Kalimpong all that long. He was living in a small bungalow on the outskirts of the bazaar area and he lived as a hermit: he never went out, he stayed confined to these two or three rooms. During the whole time that I was in Kalimpong he didn’t go out even once. And generally he did not receive visitors. He spent — this is what he told me himself — the greater part of the day meditating, engaged in different forms of meditation. And he also told me that he devoted half an hour a day to writing. He produced quite a number of books in Chinese and in English. After getting to know him I was permitted to visit him once a week: I used to spend an evening with him every week and this went on for the whole year. He was very communicative: I learned quite a lot from him, mainly about the Vajrayana and about Ch’an and Chinese Buddhism in general. I must add that he absolutely refused to consider himself as a teacher, did not allow anybody to refer to him as their teacher and their guru — he absolutely did not accept this. He wouldn’t accept disciples in the formal sense, certainly would not give initiations: if anyone would approach him for initiation he would send them along to the appropriate incarnate lama. This did not, however, prevent him from criticizing the incarnate lamas very vigorously — and he was very critical of them indeed.
He knew English quite well — he could read almost any English book — but his spoken English was abominable. He had a very strong Chinese accent, very strange ideas about English grammer. If you hadn’t known him for quite a while, you couldn’t make out what he was saying: even when he spoke English he’d need an interpreter into English. He was also very eccentric in various ways. For instance, with regards to dress. Sometimes I’d go to see him and I’d find him wearing a sort of, well, cowboy costume. I don’t know where he’d get these strange costumes from. He used to get these big parcels from Hong Kong, from Chinese Buddhists; so maybe they came from Hong Kong. But sometimes not a cowboy costume, but a very formal Chinese scholar’s dress; sometimes a little black cap, things of that sort. Big smile. I must say he was very, very excitable. I was surprised at first — well, he was meditating all day — but so excitable, so explosive, so emotional. In the end I came to the conclusion that, well, perhaps lots of energy was generated in his meditation and it sort of spilled over. That was the only explanation I could think of. He became so excited when he spoke that he sometimes shed tears, and I remember once I gave him a book on Zen by Christmas Humpreys, he read it and after reading it he shed tears... To think that people in the West are being given this sort of stuff, is a real thing
— oh he was genuinely upset, he actually shed tears to think of these poor people in the West being fed this sort of material. Anyway, I just tried to explain something to the effect, well little by little, it’s alright.
He also had all sorts of very strange visions and psychic and occult experiences which he’d usually tell me about. I must say though that what perhaps impressed me the most about him was his very good understanding of Buddhist doctrine — this is what I think I was mainly interested in. I used to ask him all sorts of questions, and he gave me I think the clearest replies that I got from any of my teachers. In the midst of all this eccentricity, there was absolute clarity of understanding, and he explained things as nobody else could. He was able to clarify things which no-one else had been able to clarify. And you may be interested to know that he eventually left his hermitage when I was in England, he left it after so many years, and he came to the United States and he settled believe it or not in California. In California he died. We remained in contact. He used to send me photographs of himself performing various activities. He was in a way very camera-conscious. I’m sure it was all very altruistic. Photographs of him feeding birds and fish, packing up boxes, performing holy ceremonies and all sorts of things. There were a band I think of semi-hippies, who although not his disciples, were people who were devoted to him, with whom he spent his time, who helped him in his work.
So that was Yogi Chen, of whom I also have very fond memories. And those were, those are, the eight — my principal Buddhist teachers. I hope I’ve been able to give you some glimpse of them. I hope I’ve been able to make them seem a bit real to you; they’re still very real to me indeed. And of course a couple of them are still alive. But even those who are dead, who have passed on, and in some cases apparently reincarnated, they’re very alive to me indeed and they are part of my life. You may be interested to know that some of our friends in England have assembled photographs of all of these eight teachers and mounted them together to as it were illustrate the sort of traditional lineage that in a very broad, general way lies behind the FWBO, especially behind the Western Buddhist Order. I’m very glad that in the course of this talk in the US, under the auspices of the FWBO, I have been able to share with you some of my experiences with my eight main teachers; and I hope that at least some of you will be inspired to carry on under the auspices of the FWBO.
Transcribed from a talk given by Sangharakshita in the United States