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Lama Zopa Rinpoche with the reincarnation of Domo Geshe Rinpoche at Sera Je Monastery, Bulakyppe, India, December 2015. Photo by Ven. Roger Kunsang.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche sent this story to a student, mentioning in his letter that Domo Geshe Rinpoche built Domo Drugkar Gompa in Tibet, where Rinpoche tells the student he became a monk:
This great yogi Domo Geshe Rinpoche and some other lamas were in Tsang together with their guru—probably their root guru—and one day the root guru sent each of them to a different place. The guru told one of the lamas to go to Tsang and said to him, “You won’t benefit sentient beings, but you will be able to do your own practice.”
Domo Geshe Rinpoche was sent by the guru toward Domo near Sikkim to live in the forest. There the gorillas used to offer fruit to him. The shepherd of one of the rich families in Domo used to go to the mountains to look after animals and while there he sometimes saw a monk coming out and sometimes he saw gorillas coming out. He told the family, his boss, and the family told him to go and see the monk and invite him to come to them. So the shepherd went to see the monk and invited him to come down to the house. The monk accepted and came down and stayed for one year in the shrine room of the house. Then after one year he asked the family if they could build a monastery and they started to build him one.
That family’s name was Bumpo Tsang and they were a rich family in the area. They started the monastery and it was a good monastery for a long time. I became a monk there, but I only stayed there for six months. At that time all of Tibet was taken over by the Chinese. It was 1959 and the monastery was full of spies. There was all kinds of mess and Chinese leaders used to come sometimes to give talks. I offered my first examination there on one volume of a text, but I didn’t get to memorize the second volume because I escaped. But I memorized the text in the mornings and evenings in Pagri, which is a big place where I lived for three years. In the mornings and evenings I would memorize the text and every day we would go to do puja for the families who were benefactors of Domo Geshe’s monastery. We went every day except maybe once a year.
I think Lama Govinda came to Tibet and met Domo Geshe Rinpoche, and maybe heard some teachings from him. That’s why he wrote The Way of the White Clouds and a second book, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, which is a mixture of tantra and science. The Way of the White Clouds was one of the first books available in the West and our very first student, Zina Rachevsky, the Russian princess, read that book and came to look for a guru at Domo Geshe’s monastery in Ghoom, Darjeeling. Maybe she was looking for Domo Geshe.
I was staying in a room in this monastery with my teacher who looked after me and my teacher Lama Yeshe. One monk met Zina outside. He could speak a few words of English so he brought her to my room, opened the door and said, “Oh, here’s your friend.” She was blond and had a Tibetan sweater from the Darjeeling bus station. My teacher offered Zina some Tibetan tea poured from a Tibetan kettle into a monk’s mug and that day she drank it completely. That was the only day I saw her drink Tibetan tea. From that time onwards I never saw her drink Tibetan tea again. It was by meeting Zina that we started Kopan monastery and built Lawudo at the same time. Gradually all the other centers happened and now there are 160 or maybe more, and we have forty-four geshes or maybe even more.
This story, “Precious Images,” is from “Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book,” published in April 2018 on the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive website:
https://www.lamayeshe.com/advice/precious-images
Lama Zopa Rinpoche is the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation, and community service.