The Lives of Holy Beings

BOOKS

Jan Willis, Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in the United Stated, has just had her new book, Enlightened Beings, published in Boston by Wisdom. She talks to Ven. Robina Courtin about why, as she acknowledges in the book, “This work belongs to Lama Yeshe.”

Jan Willis is a scholar, and in the manner of scholars she uses some 230 of her new book’s 290 pages for front and back matter commentary. But she is a scholar with devotion, and sweetness, and her work is imbued with these qualities.

The heart of Enlightened Beings is Jan’s translation of the life stories, namtar, of six Tibetan mahasiddhas of the Ganden Oral Tradition of Mahamudra of Je Tsong Khapa, holy beings who through the accomplishment of the most sublime of Lord Buddha’s esoteric meditations achieved enlightenment in one lifetime.

She wrote the book at the behest of a present-day holy being, Lama Thubten Yeshe.

“I was on my way to Nepal in 1979 to record the oral histories of living Tibetan teachers,” Jan explains. “I’d received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do this. I saw Lama in Zurich to discuss the project with him. ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘But first I want you to translate the early Gelug siddhas’ life stories. Westerners should know that there were Gelugpa mahasiddhas too!'”

This threw Jan, who held the common misconception that only Kargyupas were siddhas. Lama’s piercing look quickly moved her mind to see the illogic of this!

She first met Lama in 1969. Aged 21, she had recently graduated magna cum laude in philosophy from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Having been deeply touched by her first encounters with Tibetans in Nepal as an undergraduate, she was travelling again to the East with her dear friends Randy and Robbie Solick.

“We met an American, Arthur Mandelbaum, in Benares who had been to Nepal. ‘There are two lamas there you must meet,’ he told us. ‘Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa. ‘ I remember, something struck me about that name, Lama Yeshe …”

In Kathmandu, they found their way to Kopan, a hill rising up out of the terraced fields of the Kathmandu valley, just north of the ancient stupa at Boudhanath. The astrologer to the King of Nepal had lived in this marvelous setting, and Lama Yeshe had just moved there that year with his heart disciple Zopa Rinpoche and his first Western student Zina Rachevsky.

“Arthur had warned us that we wouldn’t get near Lama because he was guarded by Zina,” laughs Jan. “He was right!” She told them that Lama was too busy, and they were on their way to the gate after a very pleasant lunch with Zina when Lama appeared at his doorway and beckoned them into his room.

“How happy we were to be there!” Jan remembers. “He was so compassionate, and he even showed that he knew things about us. We couldn’t believe it.”

They spent a year in Nepal. Lama Yeshe arranged for Robbie and Randy to stay at a nearby house, and Jan would come up to Kopan from the Gelugpa Monastery in Boudha, where she was staying.

Jan loved Lama, but part of her was resistant to him. She saw him as very sweet and kind, but he didn’t fit her vision of The Guru. “I was prideful,” she says.

Early on, Lama sent Jan to Dharamsala to receive teachings from one of his own gurus, Geshe Rabten, who was in solitary retreat in the hills above the village of McLeod Ganj. “I stopped off in Benares on the way to Dharamsala,” Jan remembers. “I was a day or two later than I had planned when I arrived at Geshe Rabten’s retreat hut. As soon as I walked in he chewed me out! “Why did you stop off on the way? Why are you late?”

“I was dumbfounded! I have no idea how he knew that I was even coming. But somehow I liked what he did. I was doing philosophy, you see … Now this was the wisdom being! This was the lama I wanted to be with!”

Jan spent several weeks utterly engrossed in the teachings she got from Geshe Rabten. Then she returned to Kopan. As she came in the gate she saw Lama in the distance. “He looked at me so sternly and then continued on into his room. Oh oh, I thought!”

“The moment I entered Lama’s room he pointed his finger at me and told me off. Just like Geshe Rabten! Exactly! I fell on my knees, cried, prostrated. My judging mind …”

Jan soon moved to Kopan, staying with Robbie and Randy. Every day they would receive teachings from Lama (Zina had gone off to do retreat). “Lama was so beautiful, so young, his face was just glowing. Of course, his English was crazy, but so easy to understand. We’d meet in his little room in the astrologer’s house, the only building at the time. Often Lama Zopa would be there, and he’d be meditating.

“Sometimes Lama would take us with him to Kathmandu. He would buy us ice cream and we’d tag along when he visited his friends. We were so close.

“We were virtually the only students at the time. Occasionally others would come, but it was mainly just us. It was a wonderful year. Lama put us on a meditation path. I was just blown away by him, and I began to develop so much devotion.

Jan returned to the United States in the late summer of 1970, armed with the manuscript of what would be her first book, The Diamond Light of the Eastern Dawn – the title inspired by Rinpoche, who dreamed that it should include the words “Diamond Light.”

A collection of meditations gathered during her year in Nepal, the manuscript was published by Simon and Schuster in New York in 1972. “There were meditations from Lama Yeshe, Geshe Rabten, His Holiness. In writing this book I feel that I was simply a conduit for the lamas.

She returned to Cornell to pursue her career as a scholar philosopher. She spent the academic year 1970/71 working for her MA in analytic philosophy, whose main exponent is Wittgenstein. She was accepted back at Cornell, in spite of their policy not to accept Cornell BA undergraduates, who were expected to go elsewhere to do their graduate studies. And even more remarkably, they were happy to accept Diamond Light as her thesis, even though there was no Buddhism taught at Cornell then.

She began her postgraduate work in Indic and Buddhist studies at Columbia University in New York City after the summer of 1971. Here she began in earnest her study of Tibetan, and her great love, Sanskrit, which she now teaches at Wesleyan.

“I studied it with Barbara Miller, a wonderful Sanskrit teacher. I really love Sanskrit, and I think I probably learned it best,” she says. “Actually I learned Tibetan as a way of doing Sanskrit: I would learn a Sanskrit word then the Tibetan equivalent. I don’t speak Tibetan but I do the classical. I can read it quite well.

Throughout her career Jan has felt guided and protected by Lama Yeshe; always getting what she needed when she needed it, often when she looked least likely to succeed. When he and Lama Zopa taught in the West for the first time in 1974, again he took care of her.

“I had started work on my dissertation, translating from Sanskrit Asanga’s Bodhisattva-bhumi chapter on reality, and I told Lama that I was sure I needed help. Immediately he picked up the phone and called one of his gurus, Geshe Sopa in Madison, Wisconsin – it would have been one in the morning there! So kind. I went to Madison immediately and I took teachings every day for several weeks from Geshe Sopa. Lama fixed everything.” Jan’s dissertation was accepted and her PhD granted in early 1976.

Jan was teaching at the University of Santa Cruz in 1977 when she organized to have Lama Yeshe teach a semester there. “I had accepted a job at Wesleyan, where I am now, that year, so Santa Cruz would be without somebody in Tibetan Buddhism. I managed to get Lama that job.

“It went so smoothly. Lama didn’t even have a green card, but somehow many things came together. I had known the Chancellor Ed Durton for years. They met and became fast friends; he, like Lama, had a heart condition. He called a special meeting and they agreed to let Lama substitute for me.

“He lived in a student apartment in a townhouse on campus. Robbie Solick became his PA, and Jon Landaw, and Robbie lived just across the courtyard from Lama. He was blissed out! Randy would bring their baby girls over. Lama said we were like family.

“Lama was surrounded by flowers. He loved the flowers of California. He had maybe a hundred students, and often he’d get flowers every day from some of them.

“I finished early at Wesleyan so I spent June in Santa Cruz. Lama asked me to guest lecture. I remember I did a lecture on namtar, the lives of Naropa and Milarepa. Lama was there. At the end he called me over and said, ‘I am so proud of you.” I thought my heart would burst!” More than anything, Jan feels, what Lama has done for her is give her confidence.

Jan spent 1980 in Nepal, and it was during the first four months that she completed the first draft of her translation of the life stories of the six mahasiddhas that appear in her book.

Why these six? “With this group,” Jan says, “you are getting the first person after Tsong Khapa, Togden Jampel Gyatso, who was a wild yogi, and it finishes with the First Panchen Lama, Jetsun Losang Chökyi Gyeltsen, who was so important, so I thought that made a nice group for a book.”

The other four yogis are Baso Je Chökyi Gyaltsen, Drubchen Chökyi Dorje, Gyal-wa Ensapa and Kedrub Sanggye Yeshe.

From her house in Kathmandu, Jan would visit Kopan often and have long discussions about the translations with Geshe Lama Lhundrup, the abbot, and Geshe Jampa Gyatso, now resident lama at Istituto Lama Tsong Khapa in Italy.

“I would talk to Geshe Lhundrup and the other geshes in the library, and then I would always go and check with Lama. Lama was amazing. He had such an incredible mind. He could always answer your questions – and he would usually preface his answer with, ‘Oh, that’s easy!’ Lama Zopa often told me that Lama Yeshe did the same with him. Rinpoche said he never understood how Lama had the time to read all the texts. He said he could tell you anything about any text.”

In 1983, Lama asked Jan to prepare a course in Western philosophy and to teach him. “I don’t want anything easy,” he told her. “You put together a package of material and I will read them in the original.”

“I was so honored! So I developed a course – I still have it – called A Course from the Pre-Socratics to Wittgenstein. It contained four-to-five pages each of the key tenets of each philosopher, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine on up to Wittgenstein.”

Lama was staying in a house near Soquel, just out of Santa Cruz. They met three hours a day, six days a week for a month. “And he absolutely blew my mind. He was so sharp!”

“One morning, for example, we’d be discussing Plato’s argument about universals. Later, Aristotle came along and refuted Plato, saying there is no such thing as these ideals apart from specific cases of them, universal particulars. But before Lama had even heard of Aristotle, he would argue with Plato, ‘That’s silly! Of course there is no universal, you have to find the particular, the thing …’

“He waded right through the whole course like this. He read it all, in English. He studied, he did his homework. I don’t know where he found time to do it, but he did.

“Åge Delbanco – whose painting of Tsong Khapa I used for the frontispiece in the book – was Lama’s attendant at the time. We would have the class in the morning and then Lama would cook lunch. It was such a special time.”

And it was the last time Jan would see Lama Yeshe. “The year later, when he was in hospital, I would talk to him on the phone, but I never saw him again.

“I have been so blessed. And I feel that Lama is still taking care of me.”

Having done Lama’s wishes and published her book, Jam has now gone back to her original project of recording the lives of modern masters – fifteen years after Lama changed her direction.

“I hope Lama would be pleased,” smiles Jan.

• Tagged: jan willis, kopan monastery, lama yeshe, lama zopa rinpoche, mandala, zina rachevsky
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