The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Page 11

  It was Mahayana Buddhism, which is based on love, kindness, and compassion toward all, even your enemies. Over the centuries it had seeped into the very soil of Tibet and the bones of its inhabitants and had now come to their aid in their greatest hour of need. For the Mahayanist, nirvana, the liberation of self from the cycle of endless births and death, was not enough. For how could you stay in the bliss of heaven while countless others were still suffering in ignorance, they argued? The followers of Mahayana instead vowed to relinquish liberation until all beings were freed. And so they hung their prayer flags on mountaintops so that the wind could carry their messages to beings in all ten directions, and they spun their prayer wheels for the benefit of all, and every day they uttered their wish that every living creature be free from sorrow and live in lasting peace and happiness.

  While average Tibetans stopped there in their religious activity, the lamas coupled this altruistic intention with profound scholarship and an extraordinary panoply of meditation techniques set down for them to follow in order to achieve their goal of universal enlightenment. The truly dedicated set off to remote mountain caves where they meditated in isolation for years, even decades. As a result Tibet produced an unprecedented number of enlightened beings, almost on a conveyor belt. It was their finest accomplishment, and now their gift to the world.

  Freda had not experienced anything like it. In the refugees Freda found no traces of bitterness, resentment, or anger, only a reinforcement of their prayers. This resonated deeply with Freda’s own innate compassionate nature and her newly awakened Buddhist path. “Every morning and night, the chanting of incredibly soothing and rhythmical prayers of the lamas filled the air. Each home group had its private shrine, and butter lamps were burned, even if rations had to be sacrificed. Their piety and devotion meant more to them than bread,” said Freda. “The Tibetans are honest, brave, and wonderful people. The five thousand lamas we have inherited contain some of the most remarkable, spiritually advanced monks and teachers it has been my privilege to meet.”

  Freda’s spiritual life was a juggernaut now gathering momentum. Soon it would not be merely an important component of her life—it would become her whole life.

  Freda, who clearly did not believe in sheltering her children from the harsh realities of life, especially when others were in trouble, took both Kabir and Guli to work with her in the refugee camps during their school holidays. It was a harsh wake-up call, even for children who were used to precarious situations. “It was shocking,” said Guli. “People’s noses were falling off from frostbite. There was such suffering. Everything was overwhelming, especially the smell. The Indian government was doing its best, but it was a truly chaotic, critical situation.”

  “Conditions were terrible,” said Kabir. “I was put to work swabbing wounds, even though I had no medical training. I would also do trips back to Delhi to visit relief agencies to get more help, armed with the names from Mummy of who she knew could donate. There were no bandages, medicines, or anything. In fact, I myself came down with tuberculosis. Mummy treated everyone, but she had a special affinity for the women and children. She told me that it was the women who had held the men together on the march out. They were the stronger sex, but when they settled in India, they collapsed and the men took over.”

  Eventually, after months of working all hours in appalling conditions through the various camps, the strain took its toll. Freda, always finely tuned and highly sensitive, suffered another collapse and was hospitalized.

  “It was serious,” said Guli. “I was taken out of boarding school and so was Kabir to visit her at the Willingdon Nursing Home in Delhi. It was quite luxurious, with air-conditioning, so I think Mrs. Gandhi may have arranged it. She was suffering from complete mental and physical exhaustion. The doctors felt she would pull through if she saw our faces. I remember that all the shades were drawn. I sat on one side of the bed and Kabir on the other. Father said, ‘The children are here,’ and she opened her eyes and squeezed my hand. It was the first sign of life she’d shown. The next day she was sitting up in bed, on the road to recovery.

  “The problem was she couldn’t stand what she was seeing. She had to do something about it, and it had reached a point where she couldn’t handle it anymore. Mummy never allowed herself any comfort—she always lived like the people. It was part of her personal ethos. She’d always travel third class, for example, and lived in huts and tents. At one level she had enormous fortitude, but she was also fragile. And she worked so hard. She never stopped.”

  When she was better, she returned to work with added zeal. One day while she was working in Sikkim, the beautiful country bordering Nepal, dubbed one of the last Himalayan Shangri-las, she paid a visit to an old family friend, Apa Pant, an Indian diplomat stationed there. He told her she could not possibly leave without meeting the Karmapa, who had just arrived from Tibet. Freda had never heard of the Karmapa, nor had any idea of the towering figure he was within the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy, revered and respected by all. The meeting was to seal her Buddhist destiny and determine the entire course of the rest of her life.

  Many years later, she told the story in a radio interview in New York, conducted by the renowned author and religious scholar Lex Hixon.

  “‘Who is the Karmapa?’ I asked Apa Pant. ‘He’s a very wonderful lama, but he lives way out in the country in a monastery in Rumtek. There’s no road, so you will have to ride there.’ ‘That’s no problem,’ I replied. ‘I am used to riding in the mountains.’ I got hold of some ponies and a good interpreter and set off into the hills.

  “We had been riding for about three hours when we saw a horse coming toward us, with a richly colored Tibetan carpet on its back. It was the Karmapa’s tea-giver, a bearded monk whose job it was to be constantly on hand to pour the Karmapa’s tea. He’d been sent word that we were on our way and had ridden out to meet us. He laid out the carpet, we dismounted, and I had the most delicious salt butter tea, which I’d never tasted before, and biscuits. Already the feeling of Rumtek began to come through.

  “We rode along the most enchanting path, through a forest, by a stream, until we came to the monastery. It was a tiny wooden cottage that had been built by one of the Karmapa’s former incarnations, now tumbled down with hardly any paint on it, and looking all the more beautiful for that. I was taken upstairs to a little attic, and there was the Karmapa sitting on a high brocade floor cushion. He was surrounded by religious Tibetan cloth paintings (tangkas), and lots of birds in cages who were singing their hearts out. (Later I came to realize that birds were his signature—he just loves them. They sing a lot in his presence).

  “I had a wonderful talk with him, mainly about refugee matters and what I could do to help, but then I found myself getting onto the subject of meditation. At that point in my life I was feeling very sad because the gates of Burma had been shut and I was cut off from my Burmese gurus who were teaching me Vipassana. I felt like an orphan, alone and abandoned—separated by an impenetrable bamboo curtain, with them on one side and me on the other. I turned to the Karmapa and said, ‘I feel attracted to saying mantras and telling the beads, but how can I keep up my awareness meditation, Vipassana?’ The Karmapa replied, ‘Oh, just be mindful of the beads.’ It was, of course, the perfect answer.”

  Toward the end of the interview, in an almost throwaway line, Freda delivered a bombshell. “As I got ready to leave, he stood up and manifested himself to me as the Buddha. It was the first time he did it. He stood in the corner of the room with one hand raised in blessing, like you see in the exquisite Gandhara Buddha sculptures. He did it quite naturally, and flash! Again, like it happened in Burma. I saw it. From then on, he was in my heart as the special one. It just happened, and how strange it was, too.”

  His Holiness Gyalwa Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, was head of one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Kagyu, and was regarded as a spiritual giant by all people of Tibet. He was currently in his sixteenth body, the First Karmapa, Dus
um Khyenpa (“the one who knows the three times”) having the distinction of being the person responsible for establishing Tibet’s unique system of finding reincarnated great masters. Before he died, the First Karmapa wrote down where he intended to be reborn, and sure enough a few years later, following his instructions, the search party duly found the child who was recognized as Second Karmapa.

  The Kagyus trace their lineage back to the great Indian master Tilopa (988–1069) and count among their ranks some of the greatest teachers and meditators Tibet has ever produced, among them Naropa, Marpa, and his pupil, the beloved poet-saint Milarepa. Milarepa had been a villain of the first order, murdering lots of people through the power of black magic, until he sought out Marpa, who cleansed his sins through a tyrannical regime of constructing and dismantling a series of towers, until he was clear enough to retreat to a cave to engage in profound meditation. The only food he had was nettles, so his body turned entirely green, but his mind exploded into enlightenment and his voice into glorious songs.

  The Sixteenth Karmapa, now living in exile in a ramshackle monastery in Sikkim, was a powerful, illustrious figure with a strong, square face that came to a point at the crown of his head (reminiscent of the Buddha’s ushnisha). Once again Freda had cannily, although unwittingly, managed to align herself with the highest echelons of the society. She had found her heart guru. The Karmapa in turn had found not only his first Western female disciple but an invaluable, sophisticated, well-connected bridge to the workings of the bewildering outside world. He was thirty-four, Freda was forty-nine. In time, together they were to become a major force in the historical transference of Buddhism from East to West.

  In a radio interview Freda expressed the significance that finding her heart guru had for her. “We need a living guru and we train to see the Buddha in him. That gives us the water to make the seed of enlightenment grow. It was a fantastic thing that the Karmapa came into my life. Now I say the Karmapa’s mantra daily: ‘In all my lifetimes may I not be separated from my Guru.’ When I had my first flash of realization in Burma, it completely changed my life. Up to that moment I’d been a mother, professor, social worker, writer—for the first time, in Burma I was alone. I left all that behind and was able to concentrate on this deep meditation, really concentrate. It was a shower of grace from the guru.”

  Believing in reincarnation, Freda felt it was only logical that she had been the Karmapa’s disciple many times in previous lives, which accounted for their immediate close bond on meeting. The link was now reestablished and refreshed anew.

  11

  The Tulkus

  BACK IN DELHI, picking up the threads of her former life, Freda’s thoughts were never far from the refugees, her powerful encounter with the Karmapa, and the impact that Tibetan Buddhism had on her. “My old work, the editorial chair and much besides, draws me again, but my heart and mind are still with the Tibetans,” she said. At one point during this stage of her life she had an inexplicable insight. Freda “saw” that Tibetan Buddhism would not only travel to the West but would take root there. And the ones who would bring it about would be the tulkus, Tibet’s recognized reincarnated high lamas and spiritual masters, who held the essence of the teachings. Nobody else at this time shared her vision. On the face of it, it was a highly unlikely, even preposterous notion.

  Throughout its 2,500-year history Buddhism had spread widely throughout Asia, taking on the hue of the culture it had landed in, but it had never crossed the great divide between East and West. In the early 1960s, Buddhism was still virtually unknown in the West, outside of a very small handful of scholars. There were no books, no teachers, and meditation was little known. The only Buddhist organization in Britain, for example, was the Buddhist Society in London, founded in 1924 by the judge Christmas Humphreys, which confined itself to Zen and the Theravada Schools of southern Asia. Virtually nothing was known about Tibetan Buddhism (called “lamaism”), and what was known was not liked. In the eyes of the intellectual Buddhist scholars, Tibetan Buddhism was regarded as degenerate—shrouded in the magic and mystery fostered by those shamans of the Bon religion that existed in Tibet before Buddhism took root. There was too much ritual, too much Tantra, too much mumbo jumbo. Word had got out from intrepid travelers who had penetrated the secret Land of Snows that lamas could “fly,” could transform themselves into other beings, perform bilocation, leave handprints in rocks, dry wet sheets in the freezing cold by raising their body temperature at will, and “die” at will, sometimes leaving nothing behind but their robes. It was a far cry from the aesthetic, respectable, chaste lines of Zen.

  Tibetan Buddhism would certainly never catch on.

  There was also the matter of reincarnation itself, which in the predominantly Christian West was still regarded as heretical. People had been burned at the stake and been killed en masse (such as the Cathars) for believing such anathema. In the 1960s and 1970s reincarnation was still a taboo subject. The Tibetans, however, not only completely accepted reincarnation as a given fact of life, they went farther than any other Buddhist country by devising a system to find specific rebirths of accomplished spiritual masters who had forsaken higher states of consciousness after death in order to be reborn in an earthly body solely to continue to teach others how to reach the same exalted state they had achieved. The voluntary return to this vale of tears was seen as the highest mark of altruism, brave and noble beyond measure. These were the tulkus, titled rinpoches, or “Precious Ones.” They were the cream of Tibetan society, revered, feted, and sometimes unwittingly used as pawns in others’ games of corruption. These were the people Freda was now planning to bring to the West to plant the seeds of the Buddha’s teachings into American, European, and Australian soil for the first time.

  Finding the right candidates, however, posed an enormous problem. The entire community of Tibetan refugees was in total disarray, with lamas, yogis, householders, carpenters, tailors, and others mingling together in a homogenized, indistinguishable mass formerly unheard of in the conservative, strictly hierarchical society of old Tibet, where tulkus were kept apart from the hoi polloi for fear of contamination. In the diaspora all Tibetans were literally fighting for survival in this very foreign land. Many were living in tents made out of sacking, which did little to protect them from sun, rain, or cold; others were shunted into former concentration camps, and thousands were sent to remote mountainous areas to build roads by hand. The very idea of tulkus being sent as religious ambassadors to anywhere was unthinkable. At least India shared a common border with Tibet and certainly knew of the Buddha, but the West was another planet, populated, they believed, by spiritual “barbarians.”

  Undeterred by, or unaware of, these seeming obstacles Freda forged ahead with her dream. She had seen for herself what she thought were exceptional, special qualities in the handful of tulkus she had come across amid the mayhem of the camps. To her eyes they exuded an unmistakable refinement, wisdom, maturity, and dignity way beyond their years, which she was convinced would be as attractive to Westerners as it was to her. She also recognized, however, that they were trapped within a medieval world and its mind-set, which Tibet had been stuck in since Buddhism took root there in the twelfth century. For example, unexposed as they were to the march of new ideas and discoveries taking place in the outside world, all Tibetans arrived in India believing the world was flat and that the center of the universe was a mythical mountain called Mount Meru. The tulkus may have received an extraordinarily fine spiritual education, but they had no knowledge of the contemporary world nor the workings of the minds of its inhabitants.

  What she felt they needed was a school. “I realized that learning English was their key to the new world. Without English they could not go on,” she said in a radio broadcast in America. “There were many different kinds of tulkus, but they all existed like little queen bees in the center of a hive of monks and laypeople. They were so fixed in their old ways that I thought I had better educate them,” she added, referring to
the supreme deference tulkus were used to receiving. Kept apart from the rest of the monastic community, the tulkus had been clothed in rich robes, set on high thrones, and waited on by a string of attendants. This was not going to work in the outside world. Her agenda was also based on the fear that unless the tulkus received a modern education, they would eventually be cut off from the rest of their people, who were now inevitably being assimilated into the twentieth century.

  Freda’s first step was to talk to Prime Minister Nehru, who needed no persuasion. Education was the very first issue the Dalai Lama himself had raised with him as he stepped onto Indian soil. Mr. T. C. Tethong had been present as interpreter at that historic meeting. “I was shocked. Having just escaped from a deteriorating and desperate situation in Tibet, I thought His Holiness would discuss the political scenario and what could be done to help along those lines. But the Dalai Lama’s priorities were resettlement and education for his people. In retrospect he was right. We had hardly twenty people who could speak English among the refugees. Nehru had guaranteed his help. ‘Don’t worry, we will look after the refugees and support their education,’ he’d said. And he kept that promise.”

  In the autumn of 1961 the Young Lamas Home School was opened in Green Park, a new colony on the outskirts of Delhi. It was built on a pleasant piece of raised ground surrounded by a great expanse of sky, and funded by Nehru’s government. Freda’s initial plan was to take in twelve tulkus at a time, teach them English and Hindi, and educate them in current affairs, geography, and the workings of the world they had suddenly found themselves in. At the same time they were to continue their religious lessons and practices according to the school of Tibetan Buddhism that they belonged to. Each boy was given new robes as a welcome present and settled down to a fairly strict and structured regime, imposed by Freda.