Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

for a professional filmmaker, and in my wishy-washy way I once asked Mark about it.

      Me: Mark, did moving to Crestone have, uh, well, any effect on, you know, your career?

      Mark: Do you mean was it professional suicide? Yes.

      Not quite suicide, for we were gathered that night in his editing studio to view his current film in progress. Though eager to see the film, I was more curious to view a rinpoche viewing it.

      The film’s subject matter was intriguing — the 17th Karmapa, who is only in his twenties but is considered the successor or unifying figure for Tibetan Buddhism, when the Dalai Lama is no longer with us. The producer who commissioned the film had proved treacherous, all charm on the surface, all deceit underneath. He would lie to Mark, blithely break his promises, and issue contradictory directives (“Make it traditionally Tibetan. But make it like Pulp Fiction.”), and then castigate Mark for whichever one he followed. Mark worried that the producer would not even release the film, to avoid reimbursing his expenses. Mark had invited Tsoknyi to get his opinion on the movie’s contents, but I suspected Mark wanted more than amateur film criticism. Such as the answer to, How do you handle a situation when the situation is impossible?

      Anyway, I was excited. I had donned my finest finery, for I’d be meeting a rinpoche — lifetimes of wisdom in a single body! Perhaps I was expecting too much. Tsoknyi Rinpoche did not exude charisma. He did not utter profundities. He did not quote Buddhist scriptures. He did not bless anybody. Short, almost cuddly, with a round face sporting big, round glasses, he might have passed for a graduate student in electrical engineering — except engineering students don’t wear Tibetan robes and are rarely so at ease with themselves. If Hollywood ever made a movie about him, someone chiseled and seductive and not resembling Tsoknyi Rinpoche would be cast in the role of Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Yet I was not disappointed, and only later did I realize why.

      After the film’s showing, everyone showered Mark with compliments. Except for Tsoknyi, who instead got straight to the point. “Will the producer let you make the film you want?” he asked. “Will he let you make the best film you can?”

      Mark sighed: “Probably not.” Mark confessed that, utterly discouraged, he had thought of throwing in the towel and going on a meditation retreat. Meditation is in Buddhism the cure for whatever ails you. Surely Tsoknyi would approve of Mark’s plans to exchange worldly frustrations for Buddhist repose.

      But Tsoknyi never once referred to Buddhism; instead he entered into Mark’s knot of travail and attempted to untie that knot. Should the situation become unbearable, Tsoknyi said, you may have no choice but to drop it — but only for a little while. If Mark could alternate, in a pas de deux of now-off now-on, he would slip through the producer’s grasp and get done what needed to get done.⁴

      Besides, a little ordeal was worth going through to show to the world an inspiring, extraordinary being — to reveal to the world extraordinariness.

      The talk in the room now meandered, as it often does at parties, into gossip. A rebel rinpoche in Crestone named Yongzin was reportedly threatening to write a tell-all memoir, to sweep all the dirt about Tibetan Buddhism out from under the carpet. “Did this Yongzin,” Tsoknyi asked Mark, “suffer psychological wounds growing up?”

      Mark: As a matter of fact, he did.

      Tsoknyi: And has he healed them?

      Mark: As a matter of fact, he hasn’t.

      Tsoknyi: Then he has nothing to write about.

      Miserable childhoods revisited (Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, Jeannette Walls) are the stuff of bestsellers, but bestsellers were not Tsoknyi’s domain. “I teach one thing only,” the Buddha declared, “the overcoming of suffering.” That was evidently what interested Tsoknyi.

      As mentioned earlier, I had dressed up: black trousers and maroon shirt (just for fun — maroon’s the color a Tibetan lama wears). As he was leaving, Tsoknyi stopped, straightened my collar, and suggested: “You should wash your shirts more often.” Oh no, I hadn’t noticed its subdued carnival of previous spills. “Outside and inside,” he said, “reinforce each other.” Though his words could have sounded harsh, Tsoknyi immediately changed their tenor by adding, “In Tibet you would be considered a natural yogi.”

      That night Tsoknyi’s actions suggested to me what a contemporary spiritual teacher might be. He or she is not some God-channeling, holy book–interpreting, truth-expounding, morality-upholding minister whom many of us remember from our childhoods. For a contemporary spiritual teacher, psychological acumen may take the place of a theological text, and instead of dogma we have undogmatic attention to the person at hand — as Tsoknyi had attended to Mark. Tsoknyi appeared to place life before religion, for only in that way did it become religion.

      It had not always been this way. When he first came to this country, a quarter century back, Tsoknyi taught in the traditional manner. At an early retreat of his, a young woman in a tie-dyed dress had poured out her endless troubles to him. She was on the verge of suicide, she wailed, asking what she should do. Tsoknyi told her to look beneath her disturbed emotions, into the basic clear nature of mind. (Probably not very helpful — if she could do that, she wouldn’t have needed to be there.) Today Tsoknyi’s answer to such a person might be, “Did you take your meds?”

      Just as Father Dave has shifted a religious approach from right creed (orthodoxy) to right experience (orthopraxy), so Tsoknyi has changed the what of religion (right and wrong, ethics, eschatology, etc.) into how (how to handle problems, how to counter fear and depression, how to psychologically activate our better nature). If the various faiths enlisted enough Father Daves and Tsoknyi Rinpoches, religion might never be the same again.

       Interlude: A New Mantra, Followed by Lunch at the Bliss

      Should you become interested in contemporary spirituality, first thing, go out and buy a life vest. For you may soon be drowning in a sea of platitudes: “each moment be mindful” or “live in the present” or “be positive, no matter what” (which, even when sound advice, gets worn thin). Tsoknyi had been so refreshing at the party because he expressed things I’d never heard before.

      For instance? At one point he announced that he had a new mantra. “What is it, Rinpoche?” people eagerly asked. “What is your new mantra?” Tsoknyi said, “Simply this: It is real, but it is not true.” Frankly, I was perplexed. Weren’t real and true interchangeable?

      The next day, heading into town to have lunch at the Bliss Café (then the one restaurant/bar/hangout in town), I continued to mull over that real-versus-true difference. I could make a little sense of it. Real: every day (when it’s not overcast) we can see the sun rise and the sun set; true: as the Earth circles the sun, there is neither rising nor setting. Probably all religions rely on this distinction between real (or relative) truth and absolute truth, in order to counter momentary obsessions that at the time seem only too real.

      Here is a personal sort-of example.⁵ In reality, Washington, DC, is a better place for me to live. Arriving back in DC from Crestone, I land in every creature comfort and necessity, in deliciously oxygen-laden air, in more civilized temperatures, in the most politically liberal city in America and architecturally its handsomest. Yet in DC many people might as well wear blinders, so blinkered is their view of what’s existentially permissible, and in that constricted atmosphere I wind tighter and the unvoiced part of me grows more silent. In truth, Crestone is a better place for me to be, for it supports a wider spectrum of what constitutes a legitimate experience, and in that atmosphere I gradually shake free enough to hold less and less of myself back. The better reality versus the better truth: What to do?