My destination on the West coast was my friend Høne who was living in Berkeley with her husband, Chris, and their kids Thor and Amrit, whose birth in Sweden I had attended. They were part of the Vajrapani group who also included a retreat center in Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
I was running out of my three months visa, but when I asked for an extension it was denied. I was too content being in America, being, in fact, where the whole hippie revolution had started and was still very alive, so I had no intension of leaving. This became the beginning of ten years as illegal alien.
We went to Boulder Creek to visit the retreat center. The last two miles were dirt road and it was slick with about six inches of soupy mud and the car was sliding along dangerously near the creek, but we got through. The retreat consisted of a few cabins and tepees hidden at the end of the road, deep in the redwoods. It was very new; the land had been given only a year before to create a center for Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa.
It was a lovely place and I was eager to move there, but first I had things to do in Berkeley. Together with Chris, I had been asked to make a brochure aimed at raising funds for Vajrapani. I was given a room in the house of a Vajrapani couple, Gabriel from Haïti and his wife Lois. The house was at the top of Shasta road with a view of the whole of San Francisco and the bay with a peep right through the Golden Gate at the wintry sunsets. It was glorious and I, who love to be gazing out the window, could not tire of watching the shifting colors of the evening and the lights coming on in San Francisco.
I thought it was a romantic environment, S.F. is a Mecca for the tribes who were united in the youth revolution of the sixties, and here I was at the very epicenter overlooking it all from up the hill in Berkeley. My need for nature walks was satisfied by Tilden Park a few minutes away.
Within the tribe of Tibetan Buddhists I felt a direct approach to the spirit of Peace and Love. We were fortunate to have an extended visit of our kind teacher, Lama Yeshe, who enjoyed California lifestyle. There was an atmosphere of light-heartedness around him that made us all feel happier with our lives.
The true purpose of religion, as far as I can see, is to be a help in the difficult task of living and connect us with the unity and love that makes for true happiness. In Buddhism, there is no dogma, nothing you have to believe. You look for experience and experiment to build up your own understanding. Whatever happens becomes a teaching.
When a person gives up personal agenda in the compassionate service of others, then that person becomes a living bodhisattva, an example of that which is taught. Such a person teaches with his own experience and is pointing the way, but it is up to you to go the way. The teacher is not accepted point blank. I observed Lama Yeshe through thirteen years and sometimes under conditions of closeness, like living together, and always there was a radiance of gladness and humor around him that was uplifting for all.
(Spell check comment from my computer: Yeshe = yes he?)
Buddhism is an ancient and wise course in self-help, to be employed in daily life.
I keep talking about this because I meet people that are totally opposed to all religion or completely uninterested in any religion, and I feel that they throw the baby out with the bathwater. Among them, I suspect, there are some who just do not recognize their true religious feelings as being “religious”. What it all comes down to is how we act and what the results are, for our self and for others. Ignorant people often create misery for themselves.
“If your actions brings greater clarity and more compassion,” said Lama Yeshe, “then you are following the Buddha’s way, whether you call yourself a Buddhist or not, and if not, then you may call yourself a Buddhist, but you are not one.”
I’m digressing. Back to Berkeley hills. Lama Yeshe asked me what I planned to do and I said I would stay at Vajrapani Land over the winter.
“So short!” he said.
I think that was the moment when I began to realize that I was not on my way to India anymore.
Høne’s husband, Chris, had taken vows as monk and took off to Nepal to meditate and Høne and I moved with the kids Thor(5) and Amrit(4) into a tepee on the Ridge at Vajrapani Institute for Wisdom Culture, or, more simply, the Land. It was lovely to suddenly have a family and be part of a community devoted to the dream of building a place of calm for teachings and retreats, a dream that they were already living. For me it was a natural continuation of the time I had spent in Kagyu Ling and Kopan, where I had also been involved in building a center.
The Ridge had a compelling view down the valley of King’s Creek, ending in a blue mountain range on the far side of San Lorenzo Valley. At the end of the Ridge was a platform with the tepee where we stayed through this hot and dry summer that stretched into October. The sunny afternoons we rolled the cloth up on the western side and opened up for the view and the breeze that wafted up the valley with a hint of the cool ocean.
Next to the tepee was a light construction with corrugated sun roof, open on three sides to the oaks and madrones that covered the hill. This was the Ridge Kitchen, a communal center where half of the folks had dinner together every day. The Land had two such communal focal points of which the other was Jackson’s Kitchen further up the valley.
That year the creek was running strong all through the summer and I went down with the boys in the hot afternoons to cool down. My principal occupation was to paint a thanka for Chris that was the most complicated thanka I have ever painted.
Children's conference.
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