The 17th Karmapa Trinley Thaye Dorje
New Delhi
15th February 2017
Foreword
by Karma Thinley Rinpoche
The scholar Lama Jampa Thaye has recently composed this text so that those following the Buddhist teaching newly established in the West may be certain concerning the paths to be adopted and rejected. Since it is very important to discriminate between the authentic and inauthentic, please pay attention to it.
Written by the follower of the Buddha who is known as the Fourth Karma Thinley, or, according to the Great Sakyapa, known as Wangdu Norbu Nyingpo.
Introduction
We live in a time when it can appear that the road to wisdom has been lost and its very existence forgotten. In its place is merely a dead-end street full of stale ideologies. Yet the path that Buddha set forth some two-and-a-half millennia ago is still there for us, even in these modern times, if we care to find it.
This present work is essentially a series of essays on the encounter between Buddhist teachings and the West. However, it is not a formal introduction to Buddhism nor a systematic exposition of Buddhist thought. There are many of these available. Neither does it claim to represent the whole of Buddhism. Inevitably, it reflects my understanding of the particular set of teachings and practices in which I have been trained by my Tibetan masters.
Buddhism itself developed out of the teachings given by the warm and friendly South Asian prince known to his followers as ‘The Sage of the Shakyas’.1 At the heart of these teachings is the insight that suffering arises primarily from our mistaken ideas about ourselves and the nature of the world – errors that prompt the arising of a confluence of disturbing emotions and actions. According to Buddha, liberation from suffering is always possible, through the transformation of our error into understanding, brought about by training in the three-fold path of ethics, meditation and wisdom. Thus, despite its ancient origins, Buddhism would seem to be uniquely well suited to the modern world.
The first half of this work considers the space that now exists for Buddhism in our culture. This is a space that has been opened up by the failure of our dominant systems of thought to provide an intelligent account of what it is to be human and how we should conduct ourselves in this world.
However, although this space exists, if Buddhism is to fill it effectively, the temptation to assimilate it to contemporary ideologies must be resisted. Nothing could be more destructive for Buddhism in the long run. With this point in mind, the latter chapters of this book consider how best the Buddha’s teachings might be understood and practised today. There has been considerable enthusiasm directed to these subjects, but it is vital that we discriminate between authentic and fake presentations, the latter being those proffered by self-appointed authorities, which are thus unconnected with the unbroken traditions of teaching and practice, and, furthermore, whose presentations are refuted by direct experience or reasoning.
All too often, through a mixture of conceit and credulity, we have settled for the latter. Unfortunately, if we persist in getting Buddhism wrong in this way, the opportunity for it to shape our lives will be lost and Buddhism itself is likely to remain in cultural memory as nothing more than a temporary fad – another Theosophy.
Wisdom in Exile draws from the teachings I have received over the past five decades from His Holiness the 41st Sakya Trizin, Karma Thinley Rinpoche and various other Tibetan teachers, and, as such, it refers extensively to works composed by eminent masters of the Buddhist tradition. Therefore I’ve included a list of these masters at the end of this book, if only to make their names a little better known.
Some elements of this work have appeared in the online and print editions of Tricycle, while some other sections have featured in teachings given in Los Angeles and Dhagpo Kagyu Ling in France.
Thanks to Peter Popham and Liz Nash for their help in this project, and, as always, to my wife Albena and family. Thanks also to Ed Curtis, Adrian O’Sullivan and my editor Benjamin Lister.
Lama Jampa Thaye
Sakya Changlochen Ling, France
18th August 2016
Chapter 1
Meetings
It’s 21st June 1974, and I’m standing in the doorway of the Buddhist Society in London, a big fine Georgian town house close to Victoria Station. On one side of me is a young Tibetan lama, Chime Rinpoche, and, on the other, is His Honour Judge Christmas Humphreys QC, the President of the Society, and an imposing figure as befits an Old Bailey judge. We are there to greet His Holiness the 41st Sakya Trizin, the twenty-eight-year-old head of the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, on his first visit to England. The Buddhist Society and the Tibet Relief Fund have organised a reception in his honour, and Rinpoche has told me I can tag along.
After a few minutes, His Honour turns to Rinpoche, wanting to check the title of the person he is to welcome. At that same moment, a car pulls up and out steps His Holiness with an easy smile. He’s accompanied by a couple of monks and two European ladies.
After we have shuffled upstairs to the reception room, Mr Humphreys delivers a speech of welcome, during which he highlights at length his part in the forming of the Society back in 1924 and his own unique role as the first person in history to discern the twelve essential principles of Buddhism. Discreet mention is also made of the President’s deep friendship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to whom His Honour had been able to impart much sage advice. As the speech goes on, my mind drifts back to my very first visit to a Buddhist Society function some three years earlier. An English monk, the Venerable Pannavadho, had presided over the celebrations of Buddha’s birthday, but, although Pannavadho himself was eminently serious and the Society’s members were obviously sincere, it didn’t seem like much of a celebration to me at the time. My companion’s head was exploding and we had to make it out of there fast. The place, all mahogany and boredom, was so stuffy, I could hardly breathe.
My English Literature teacher, Mr Campbell, had set me on this road. It was 1966, and I was fourteen years old, a pupil at a Catholic Grammar school in the northern English city of Manchester: a grey place in a grey time. It was still the aftermath of the Second World War. British society was only just emerging from the hardness of those years, but something was active in the culture that would, among other things, help open a door for Buddhism. It was at the end of a class on Julius Caesar when this mighty colossus of a schoolmaster told me that someone who admired Bob Dylan as much as I did would certainly like Jack Kerouac: and so it turned out. I entered the world of the ‘Beat Generation’ writers through his books like On the Road and Dharma Bums, immediately realising that Dylan had been there already. Even more importantly, although Kerouac’s work was tinged with a working-class Catholic sensibility with which I was very familiar, I discovered Buddhism there. I knew right away that I had found my way home.
While I was somewhat devout as a child, I already had a sense that the God of Catholicism was just too small. Whatever blessings and spiritual power had existed in the Church seemed to have evaporated long ago. Although in my early years I had felt repeated experiences of bliss and light, I couldn’t connect them with anything I heard at church or in school. As time went by, I started to have powerful experiences where names, thoughts, and even time itself, seemed to be utterly empty. It was a world – the real world – from which one might return as an exile to the shadowy world of everyday life, but which would always be there. I could barely speak of these experiences, and any attempt to articulate them was useless, although I tried.
After a while,