I’ve been at Institut Vajra Yogini since July 25. It’s in a big old three-story house, Chateau d’en Clausade, with 25 bedrooms, a couple of meditation halls, dining halls, and the rest. It’s an hour east of Toulouse, in the south of the country, and, apparently, used to belong to one or other of Toulouse Lautrec’s family in the late 19th century. (institutvajrayogini.com)
Francois and Violette; and a view from one of the south-facing rooms.
It’s in the countryside, with views all round, especially from the third-floor attic room where I stayed, which looks out over their stupa and into the north. Francois and Violette run it and do such a good job. Violette has been in a singer in the past and you can often hear her lovely, operatic voice in the corridors.
Actually, they also – like Kadampa Center in North Carolina – don’t charge for their courses. As they say in their program: “Participation libre.” It takes courage to have this approach. But it seems to work. Reports from both Francois and Robbie in Raleigh are that they always bring in the money they need, even for the big, expensive courses like Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s, for example.
An old friend of Lama’s, Geshe Tengye, was resident teacher until 10 years ago. He’s retired now and lives in his house behind the chateau. Geshe-la lived in Thailand for years, in the ’70s, as a representative for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. When Lama got the chateau, he contacted Geshe-la who was living at a Vietnamese monastery in Paris and asked him to please be the resident teacher. Geshe-la said no. And after another request and another no, Lama apparently cried, and said to Geshe-la, “If you don’t come we won’t have a center.” This time Geshe-la agreed.
Taking Geshe-la home after having given refuge to some of the participants in a course I gave at the institute. Here we are below.
His Holiness will be in Toulouse soon: teaching at Le Zenith to 7,000 people August 13-15. Francois is the president of the organizing committee, which consists of Buddhist groups in France.
Right now Yangsi Rinpoche from Maitripa College in Portland is here, preparing people for one of the texts His Holiness will teach, on meditation. Today the students will present a play to everyone: their take on the Eight Verses of Mind Training. Rinpoche is the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe’s Sera Je meditation teacher Geshe Ngawang Gendun; his sister is Tsen-la, who translates for the lamas and who, in 1979 under Lama’s instruction, established Kopan’s sister nunnery Khachoe Ghakyil Ling.
Khandro-la (see Postcard 5) will be at Nalanda soon, where she’ll teach after His Holiness’s course. She was here last year as well. She’s been in Nepal for weeks, helping to heal Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
Puja at Nalanda with, from left, Nalanda’s resident lama Geshe Lobsang Jamphel, Khandro-la, Dagri Rinpoche, and Geshe Tenzin Dorje, former resident lama at Institut Vajra Yogini after Geshe Tengye
And Lama Osel is coming for the Essential Education conference at Institut Vajra Yogini after His Holiness’s teachings; he’ll be here for His Holiness, too, and will stay at the institute. I haven’t seen him since he was 7. I had contact for several years, however, when I edited Mandala we had Lama Osel’s News on the back page.
Institut Vajra Yogini started in 1979 or so. In 1981 there was a fire in the west wing and Lama Yeshe advised them to use the insurance payout to buy a property nearby for a nunnery. Nalanda Monastery was the result, 15 minutes west of here. I remember how pleased we nuns were when we talked about our new nunnery during the 1982 first Enlightened Experience Celebration, a gathering of 70 FPMT sangha and a couple of hundred lay people in India that Lama Yeshe had organized. Not long after this, Lama changed his mind and gave it to the monks! The nuns ended up with a building next to Institut Vajra Yogini and we called it Dorje Pagmo. A small group of nuns lasted there a few years. According to the nuns here now they’re trying again to start a community.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama being greeted at Toulouse Airport in October, 1982 by Lama Yeshe, one of the benefactors for His Holiness’s visit to France, Spain and Italy.
I stayed at Nalanda in 1982 for His Holiness’s visit, when I was one of the security guards chosen by Lama (see postcard 8, in which I forgot to mention France). I slept in the office, on the floor. One of my jobs was to clean His Holiness’s room; I spent a lot of time cleaning the bathroom, I remember. The lamas stay in His Holiness’s room now.
The weather here is changeable: it’s been very hot on many days, and, like today, pretty chilly. I’m sitting here on the deck of Francois and Violette’s little cottage down in the trees away from the main house wrapped in a blanket. I haven’t done much walking while I’m here. I’m energized to go for walks in the city, but not in the bush. The most I do is circumambulate the stupa a couple of times.
I’m into my second week of editing the lamas’ teachings. One is Lama Yeshe’s 1981 teachings in Australia on mahamudra and the other is Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s 2003 teachings – given here, actually – on death.
Lama says: “You’re not just practicing during the meditation sessions or during teachings, but all the time: while you’re eating, while you’re walking, all the time you are meditating. This is very useful. In the Gelugpa tradition, when we take mahamudra teachings, we have to run to find our I. It’s like one day, your guru says to you, ‘Now you go and seek your I.’ In this tradition, when you go outside, wherever you are, you look at your reactions, is the I existent or not? You just watch, checking the concrete conceptions of the I. When a situation brings up the I, inside or outside, is the I there or not?
“This tradition is very important. When we describe the experience of ego, it’s intellectual. Maybe intellectually you try to find the ego, and he disappears. Ego is like a thief. When you relax, when he thinks you are not watching, he comes out. When you are watching, he hides. When you try too hard to find him, he disappears. The ego mind is so sneaky, so intelligent. So, during the session breaks, you just look. Ego comes this way, that way. Check it out. Just watch.”
And Rinpoche says: “Prepare to die with a happy mind: The main thing, the most important thing, is to have a peaceful, happy mind so that you can have a peaceful, happy death. Then you will go to the pure land of Buddha where there’s no suffering at all and where you can become enlightened: this is a quick way to become free from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and to achieve enlightenment. After that you can again reincarnate in the human world, with a perfect human body, and be able to benefit others. Or instead, after death you could take a perfect human rebirth, meditate on the part of the path that you haven’t actualized in the previous life, and then achieve enlightenment.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche turning a prayer wheel at Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu, just down the road from Kopan Monastery. Rinpoche has been at Kopan since June, continuing his recovery from a stroke suffered while leading a retreat at Atisha Centre in Bendigo, Australia.
“How to die with a happy mind: give up attachment: The basic method, the fundamental thing to do in order for your mind to be free at the time of death, in order to have no worries, no fears, for there to be nothing that ties your mind – to not be like the bird who wants to fly in the sky, who has such a strong wish to fly but cannot because its legs are fastened by a rope that is bolted to the rock – the thing to do is give up attachment.
“What makes death so difficult, what brings so much fear, worry, what makes your mind not free, is attachment, grasping at family members, friends, possessions, property, money, one’s own body. Therefore you need to generate renunciation of samsara by doing strong meditation on, thinking about, the shortcomings of samsara, how these samsaric perfections are in the nature of suffering. Thinking about their shortcoming cuts attachment, like cutting the rope that holds the bird’s feet to the bolt in the rock. You cut the rope, you release the bird so it can fly. This is the main thing to meditate on, to put effort into: freeing yourself, letting go.
“Then you can also advise others who are dying how to free their minds, how to be happy at the time of death, instead of getting caught, stuck. You can advise them skillfully, according to their minds.”
