This is where Rinpoche started with me as a disciple 39 years ago. It was our first sit down together. We met the night before in Bob and Colleen’s kitchen. Rinpoche was in his room. Colleen had made tea and asked Khenpo Karthar if he wanted some. And there he was as if summoned from my imagination, a middle aged Tibetan in the robes of a Karma Kagyu monk.
Up until that moment I had thought I wanted to be a Zen Buddhist. I had been sitting, following Shunryu Suzuki’s instructions (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind), since the summer of 1979. It changed my life, as much as it took to change my life as an 18 year old.
Since Spring I had been sitting with Bob and Colleen twice a week in their living room. Bob had placed an ad in the Chicago Reader classified section. “Free meditation instruction in the Tibetan Tradition.” I called. It turned out we were neighbors. It wasn’t what I was looking for as a Buddhist but I was new to Chicago and it was nice to know somebody. They had a small child which made for a challenging dynamic to work with as meditators. The discussions afterwards were as rewarding as the time spent trying to meditate.
Rinpoche’s instructions that Bob and Colleen had received, much through the grape vine, mostly Ngodrup, Rinpoche’s translator, and Kathy in Columbus, Ohio, guided us in these early months together. To my mind Tibetan Buddhism was for Tibetans, as the name implied. The Vajrayana was nothing but magical thinking. Yet here we were under the guidance of Khenpo Karthar putting his instructions into practice together as we moved forward into our respective lives and the people we were to become as adults.
When Rinpoche entered the small kitchen I stood up and prostrated before him. I don’t know where that came from. We did prostrations when we entered Bob and Colleen’s living room shrine as we decided at the time to be the routine we would follow. I had no issue with following their example. I had never prostrated before another person though so finding myself prostrating before Khenpo Karthar took me by surprise.
For Rinpoche we were his first disciples. Among Tibetans he was just a monk. But for Bob and Colleen he wasn’t a nobody that nobody sent for. “We-don’t-want- nobody-nobody-sent-for” as they would say in Chicago back then. Rinpoche was sent to us by the Karmapa himself.
The next day I had Rinpoche and Ngodrup to myself for the afternoon. We sat in the sun room off of the living room in the front of Bob and Colleen’s third floor Rogers Park apartment on Bosworth Avenue. The western exposure bathed us in a September light that afternoon. And the three of us talked and listened to each other.
It was as if we would never again have the opportunity to speak together like this. It was a now or never kind of situation. No stone was left unturned as such. In the end Rinpoche grasped both my hands and placed his forehead to mine and told me we would never again be apart, in the words of the final lines of the Mahamudra Ngondro I have practiced daily ever since.