Been editing a lot lately and yesterday I put a clip up onto YouTube from my interview with Werner Erhard.

gregg

A new and revised edition of The Voice of Hope is coming out in January 2008. It will include a new
preface that puts into context the recent monk-led uprisings in Burma, a 16 page chronology of key
events in Burma, a how to help section with 66 of the leading organizations in the world supporting
Burma’s freedom, and a ten page interview with the monk who was one of the leaders of the recent
uprisings in Burma (and who is currently imprisoned, and according to Amnesty International,  if
convicted, may face the death penalty).

The preface to the new edition is on the World Dharma web site,

www.everydayrevolution.org under the ‘donate’ section.

gregg

will teach at the Berkeley Shambhala Center in November 2008

I have some recollections of interviewing her in my blog post called "Ani-la"

I was going through my other computer and found an update I'd done in 2005:

While in Nepal last year, at first I was very frustrated because there was an enormous wang going on, a two-week long ritual where the Nyingma elder statesman, HH Trulshik Rinpoche, was passing on Dzogchen teachings and permissions to the young Dudjom Rinpoche and Khyentse Rinpoche yangsis. The teachers I had hoped to talk to were the central figures in this ritual attended by 6,000 people at Shechen Monastery.

I actually looked into the offerings of trekking companies to work in a more conventional vacation since everyone said, “Let’s talk in a couple of weeks because I’m really booked now.”  When you’re on the other side of the world with fixed departure dates, that’s not the greatest news.

Then there was the business of Maoist insurgents in the hinterland so for a few days I gave instruction to Kathmandu bartenders in the mixing of proper Western martinis. The toxic aberrations that were sold before my trip I’m sure caused untold casualties so I made my small contribution to the public safety and general welfare. 

Not only did it work out for me to attend this event, I received permission to film it and lamas even told me, “Be sure to get this… don’t forget XYZ” so there are aspiring directors in the most interesting of places.

This was a very sacred event. To preserve the sanctity of the actual teachings, I will set the images to the closing chants that were led by a monk with a very powerful bass voice and next to me were eight nuns that chanted as almost a single unit and provide a great tonal counterpoint to the monk’s voice...

As a fun tangent, I have also developed a collection of photographs of the various teachers’ dogs, whom I got acquainted with as I’d wait to meet with the teachers. 

There is Tashi, HH Penor Rinpoche’s chubby hound in upstate New York, Percy, the movie star dog of Khandro Rinpoche’s sister, Jetsunla, at Samten Tse in India, who gets to sit on the sofa with Rinpoche when she teaches, Rabjam Rinpoche’s grumpy German shepherd and much calmer Labrador in Nepal. Should make for a cute Flash slide show.

I originally posted this to an email list that I'm on, but also thought it might be of wider interest. --gregg

I originally sent the link to Gene Smith's commentary on Terdag Lingpa and terma to the Emaho list. For those exclusively on the Gateway list, here is the link. The clip runs 21 minutes.

Mr. Smith was one of the early Tibet scholars. He was a graduate student at the University of Washington when the Rockefeller Foundation set up seven Tibetan lamas in teaching situations immediately after the fall of Tibet. (The seven were in various locations around the world and included Namkhai Norbu in Italy and Dezhung Rinpoche at UW, who was the subject of the book, A Saint in Seattle.) Gene became a primary cultural liaison with Dezhung Rinpoche, a Sakya teacher.

Starting in the mid 1960's, Gene headed up the New Delhi office of the Library of Congress for twenty years. Through the curious workings of US foreign aid, India partially offset their receipt of foreign aid by providing various goods-- including copies of sacred texts— to the US government. Part of Gene's mission was to seek out these sacred texts and make copies of them on behalf of the Library of Congress.

The Sixteenth Karmapa provided Gene with Thirteenth Karmapa's copy of the canon of the words of Buddha (100+ volumes) then of the commentary associated with those texts (200+ volumes). Those copied texts were freely distributed to monasteries and contributed to the rebuilding of Tibetan dharma activities in exile.

His more visible contributions have been in the Forewards that he wrote which provided invaluable guidance to the scholars that would follow him. The book Among Tibetan Texts is a collection of those forewards. The blurbs on this book include: "Every Western Tibetologist consults Gene Smith." --Janet Gyatso, Harvard Divinity School "No one knows the full range of Tibetan literature better than Gene Smith. His numerous introductions to Tibetan works are so valuable as to be priceless." -- Jeffery Hopkins, University of Virginia

Needless to say, it was quite a privilege to speak to someone so learned and so giving of their knowledge. I hope you find his commentary of interest and benefit,

 

 

One of my other projects is producing Pema Chodron's website. I added some new content today that a great group has helped translate into Spanish. The new Spanish language content is on the landing page:

www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema

Before there was Tony Robbins and life coaching, before there was Dr. Phil and tough love on network TV, before there was Mort Downey the first confrontational TV host, there was something called "est" and a man named Werner Erhard.

Besides being a significant, if not controversial, cultural figure in the 1970s, Werner had a friendship with His Holiness Karmapa and the est Foundation hosted Karmapa in several cities. Having spent a few years examining the life of Karmapa, the range and scope of his activity continues to amaze me. But when I saw a flyer for the Black Crown ceremony at San Francisco's Masonic Auditorium, where Karmapa was "Introduced by Werner," I was surprised and maybe a little jarred. If Karmapa's life was about anything, it was about building bridges.

A film is being released on Werner's life and work called "Transformation." Check out the trailer. In the parlance of our times, Werner would "throw down."  Also see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy8ysxIOyAA

I recently got to interview Werner Erhard in Santa Monica, California and it was a very interesting conversation. In the mid seventies, Werner traveled to India and had extended audiences with several spiritual masters, including the Dalai Lama, and actually stayed at Rumtek for three weeks, where he had close contact with Karmapa. When Karmapa and his traveling group toured the West in 1977, they stayed at Werner's house in San Francisco for a few weeks.

Later in the seventies and in subsequent years, controversy and indicting media attention were major associations to Werner's name. In the est heyday, Werner was a gateway and influencer of American culture so his recollections of Karmapa are of particular relevance. His work has been built upon by others in the decades since and also continued through the followup organization to est, whose flagship program is the Landmark Forum.

I'd wanted to meet Ani Tenzin Palmo for a long time. I heard recordings of talks that she gave at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center in 1996 and they completely lit me up. She had this undiluted clarity of signal (I don't mean acoustically) that sticks with you. A wealth of heart and experience came through. It reminded me of an interview that I heard with Leonard Bernstein towards the end of his life where he talked about Mahler's realization of his (premature) mortality and rendering that in the Ninth Symphony.

Later, the book A Cave in the Snow would be published about her life, which focused on her extensive experience of solitary retreat. It's probably a modest dimension of Tenzin Palmo's relevance to the dharma, particularly as encountered by Westerners. It was off to Himachal Pradesh in northern India that I headed.

I was driven to Tashi Jong. Dongyu Gatsal, her nunnery, has since launched and is located of couple of miles/kilometers up the road in the direction of Dharamsala.

We chatted but she'd made arrangements for her periodic head shaving, which she was going to have done in a bit. Tenzin Palmo said something to the effect of, What's the point in having a discipline if you're not going to follow through on it? Have to keep up the example for the other nuns and all.

You can take the lady out of England but you're not taking the England out of the lady. Her electric shaver shorted out and we wound up having our first introductory chat as she had her head shaved with a straight razor. So that was a first for me….

Ani-la has a remarkable combination of extreme vividness and vivaciousness with genuine humility, the sort that honestly keeps in mind her first hand contact with the activities and accomplishments of masters that will be seen as historically significant. In other words, Tenzin Palmo was enormously fun to talk to.

After becoming Chogyam Trungpa's first Western student while living in England, she was one of the first Westerners to encounter Tibetan Buddhism in India in the early sixties. In those first years, Westerners went from being perceived as noble born, given the former British ruling class, to basically being viewed as useless drug addicts as Westerners later arrived in the form of wandering hippies.

She and her mother traveled by rail, third class, in the mid-sixties to visit HH Karmapa XVI in Calcutta… in the days before Aquafina. Forty years later, I would get food poisoning at the Kathmandu Hyatt and flop around for 30 hours in living hell/bardo so my appreciation of the Western dharma pioneers knows no bounds.

In 1967, when Tenzin Palmo took novice ordination at Rumtek from HH Karmapa XVI, he did the Black Crown ceremony for the occasion.

In the story of Gyalwa Karmapa, Rumtek figures prominently. His monastery comes up in all conversations. Much more than a location, Rumtek is really a secondary character. Having images of Rumtek was imperative to properly telling the story of Karmapa.

Since there was helicopter service from the Bagdogra airport in eastern India to Gangtok, Sikkim, getting aerial images of Rumtek looked feasible. Should just be a matter of rupees.

I was on a filmmaker roll, have this David Lean-Francis Ford Coppola thing going on… interesting angles, incandescent sun illuminating the grandeur of Rumtek and such. However, I knew first-hand that helicopters could be quite loud.

When I was in school, I had a neighbor that was a police officer. His house got broken into and some of his weapons were stolen. That caused a cop full court press.

I had an alibi and was my doing my Spanish homework. However, part of the response was a low circling helicopter overhead with a spotlight for half an hour. It didn't take much in my pre-meditating, easily distracted days to go off-track, but feeling the rotor whop-whop in your thoracic cavity will mess with your samadhi, I don't care who you are.

You're sitting there, minding your own business, pondering imponderables, doing some realizing, and then there's helicopter guy overhead doing laps. Bodhisattvas or not, I could see where that might be obnoxious or at least lose me goodwill in filming on the grounds of Rumtek.

Still, some helo footage could work really well. I asked The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche about it when he was in town. As a former resident of Rumtek and attendant to Karmapa, he could clarify protocols, appropriateness, etc.

He was wise. He was experienced with both Eastern and Western cultures. He understood.

It wasn't that it would be rude, he said, the real issue was that "both the Indian and Chinese governments would consider that a national security situation and stop you."

OK. Blink. Blink. I'm going to start taking some notes now. My one-pointed concentration kicked in.

When you're a trained film professional, inadvertently causing national security situations goes in the "Bad" column. Aspiring filmmakers should repeat this point frequently, 108,000 times minimum.

If you're familiar with senior Tibetan lamas of the Kagyu lineage, most names that will first come to mind will be of teachers who were at Rumtek Monastery with His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa.

The original abbot at Rumtek was Very Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche. The Karmapa discovered Rinpoche as a tulku. Whenever you see pictures of Rinpoche or get to see him in person, he has an enormous smile, a joviality, a big-heartedness to him that registers even if you're at the back of the room. He is the senior teacher of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

I sent his peeps an email describing my project and myself. By this time, I was subletting an apartment, doing some short-term software work and prepping to go to India and Nepal. I eventually got an email back from someone writing under the name of Thrangu Rinpoche, who I assumed was a translator or attendant. It wasn't like Rinpoche would really have a Yahoo! account.

Rinpoche was willing to initially speak to me when he was coming to teach in San Francisco. I would meet briefly with him at a local Kagyu center and hopefully work out arrangements to speak in greater depth in Asia.

I arrived at the center and was brought into an essentially empty room. There was just Rinpoche seated on cushions. No real furniture to speak of. No translator in the room. I scanned for a palm tree, a ficus, something.

"Hullo," Rinpoche said.

That joviality I referred to earlier—that was someplace else. Today, he was all business.

I felt an inexplicable surge of compassion for every gazelle and wildebeast on the plains of the Serengeti. I offered my prostrations and khata then introduced myself. I resumed breathing. Very Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche was a big hitter, no joke.

The discussion of "why" did come up, more discreetly than it usually comes up with people of the entourage. Again, it was simple thing, so I thought, it was important, it was a genuine need and I could see what needed to be done: it would be interesting and fun. We agreed to talk in India. Then he thanked me. So that became my big contemplation for the morning as I made my way on the freeway, late as usual. Soon after, I was off to India.

Interviewing Rinpoche is simply a privilege. How else do you describe hearing about the decline and fall of Tibet from a living witness, not to mention receiving Karmapa's escape route? Like the John Muir Trail and the path of Lewis and Clark, I hope this path will be traveled by many who will appreciate its significance, what it cost, what it brought.

Rinpoche is a treasure trove of history, context and so much more. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche told me that if I wanted to understand how the Black Crown ceremony came about, its purpose and intent, that Thrangu Rinpoche was "the perfect person to talk to. He was the one who taught me." And Rinpoche does not disappoint.