From a Mountain in Tibet: Review

From a Mountain in Tibet 

Review: Lama Yeshe Losang Rinpoche's tale of a monk's life 

In October, I am going to Nepal, partly to work alongside my students with Tibetan refugees in Pokhara. While there, we will also visit monasteries and learn something of Tibetan meditative culture. It is a way of being that fascinates me.

Give me a chance for research and preparation, and I am a happy man. Physical preparations for this trip, which also includes a hike in the Annapurna region, have been ongoing for months, as has the accumulation of kit. I’ll write more about that in the coming weeks. But the intellectual preparation is just as important.

Tibetan Buddhism is not a tradition I know well. Indeed, it has not been known in the West for long. Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet gives one of the first twentieth-century accounts of a European who spent considerable time there getting to know the religion, culture and practices of Lhasa. It is, for all of Harrer’s close contact with the Dalai Lama before his exile, questionable. Harrer, for all of his accomplishments as a mountaineer, was also a Nazi Party member, whether under compulsion to be so or not. His, therefore, is a legacy about which I am cautious.

Among westerners, I prefer to get my grounding from those who have studied Tibetan Buddhism in great depth, Robert Thurman among them. Thurman’s podcast is informed by years of dedicated academic study as a Professor of Buddhism at Columbia University, as well as being one of the first ordained Westerners as a Tibetan monk. I’ve read some of his books and continue to work through them.

Better still, however, is to go directly to the accounts of Tibetans who have brought their religion to the West, a sad result of their persecution and exile after the Chinese occupation of the region. There is none better than Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche, current Abbot of Samye Ling, the first western centre and monastery for Tibetan Buddhism, co-founded by his brother, Choje Akong Tulku Rinpoche.

Yeshe Losal’s account is made all the more fascinating by his initial rejection of the Buddhist tradition. Born in rural Tibet, his story begins with his brother’s discovery by Buddhist Lamas as a reincarnation of a Tulku, an enlightened Bhodisattva who had dedicated himself to be reborn repeatedly and to teach the Dharma until all beings are enlightened. To have an elder brother so blessed is, as Yeshe Losal learns, to always be the annoying younger brother, a role to which he lived up for years.

It was after he had been taken to his older brother’s monastery to train to be his personal assistant that he began to rebel. For years, they had a tempestuous relationship. Yeshe Losal recalls his great privilege in being close to numerous highly venerated teachers, but unwilling to commit to their teaching. One such teacher was his brother’s great friend, Chogyäm Trungpa Rinpoche. It was Trungpa, another Tulku, who persuaded Akong to flee Tibet after the invasion of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, signalling the execution, torture and imprisonment of great numbers of Tibetan monks and nuns.

The story of that escape, fleeing roadblocks, informers and navigating the high passes of the Himalayas, is epic. This alone is worth the book’s price for the tale of peril and adventure that ensues. But what he finds on his escape to India is all the more enlightening. Tibetan culture was largely unknown outside of that isolated nation for centuries. Yeshe Losal and his compatriots discovered the need not only to navigate a modern world with all its distractions and temptations but to also protect the unique legacy of a culture and religion under assault in their homeland.

The story that follows is one of remarkable endurance and open-mindedness. Yeshe Losal contracts tuberculosis in a refugee camp, moves around India, is subjected to an enforced refugee’s education to which he is resistant, before rejoining his brother, first in Scotland and then in his travels with Chogyäm Trungpa, a most unorthodox teacher of Buddhism, in the USA. Along the way, he is recognised and taught by one of the most important figures of Tibetan Buddhism’s transmission to the West, the 16th Karmapa, one of the major tulkus and religious figures, second only to the Dalai Lama himself in the Tibetan tradition.

Yeshe Losal finds himself living the same life of free-wheeling drinking and womanising that has become a part of the story of his great friend Chogyäm Trungpa, but, as he attests in the book, one that he became dissatisfied with despite his loyalty to his friend’s spiritual legacy. At 37, he chose to seek ordination, took monastic vows and embarked on a life of monastic study that included an initial five-year retreat, meditating in isolation under the guidance of teachers. You read that right: five years straight of isolation.

On the completion of that five-year programme, completed in New York State at the Karmapa’s study centre, his return to Scotland came at the behest of his brother. There, he not only solidified the standing of Samye Ling but also established a remote island retreat centre of the Isle of Arran, where, among other things, he completed a dark retreat.

Dark retreats, for the uninitiated (like me), are one of the numerous incredibly austere spiritual practices of the Tibetan tradition. It’s worth noting that Yeshe Losal completed his first in Nepal under the guidance of a master of the tradition, having just completed another form of teaching, including 10,000 full-body prostrations. He is not a man who lacks dedication or discipline despite all the dissolution of his early life. Dark retreats, however, are beyond my comprehension, an attempt to study the workings of the mind under almost complete sensory deprivation: complete darkness and silence, without company for 49 days. The adept is given food once a day, but otherwise is entirely alone with their thoughts. The practice is supposed to simulate the belief that after a person dies, they spend 49 days in the Bardo - an intermediary zone - before rebirth. Navigating this realm without delusion is supposed to encourage auspicious rebirth. The dedication to confront the constructions and illusions of the mind under those circumstances is almost unimaginable to me in its complexity and challenges. To do it multiple times, as Yeshe Losal has managed, is a dedication to exploring the workings of the mind that I find as admirable as terrifying.

The insight, clarity and great humanity of this book left me a little more knowledgeable about the great and imperilled tradition that Yeshe Losal Rinpoche represents and all the more excited by the prospect of discovering more. While I won’t be embarking on any prostrations or dark retreats soon, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough as an account of a fascinating culture and a life of dedication and honest self-examination.