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Lawrence Greenberg passed away recently at the age of 83 in Downey, California.
The following words in celebration of Lawrence’s life were offered by Thubten Wongmo, Lawrence’s former wife.
In 1969, I met Lawrence at a wedding party in Santa Monica, at a difficult and even kind of dangerous time in my life. He was an accomplished artist, poet, and jewelry maker, and just a very nice man. He pretty much saved me that day, and eventually we married in my beloved grandmother’s garden.
We lived near the Hog Farm commune in Llano, New Mexico (near Taos) for a while, then we took off for Europe where I had my baby, Daja Wangchuk, in Geneva where we had taken refuge in these eccentric Americans who took in young hippie travelers. There we met Barbara and Chris Vautier.
To make a very long story short, after staying in southern Spain and then Greece, we traveled overland to India. I had been reading Meher Baba’s books who advised to find a living guru in “the spiritual mother of the world.” Lawrence kindly did all the rough driving, but then we crashed the VW bus in Afghanistan. We got a ride with some German travelers on their way to McLeod. Lawrence came down with hepatitis, giving me the time to meet people studying at the Tibetan Library with Geshe Ngawang Dargye.
Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche with Lawrence’s painting of the Four Harmonious Friends. Photo courtesy of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.
I decided to get ordained, so in my first meeting with Lama Yeshe, Lama agreed but advised to be gentle with Lawrence about this decision. When Lawrence and I separated, Lama saw that Lawrence was a bit lost, and he ever so kindly invited him to stay at Tushita Retreat Center and paint the Four Harmonious Friends as a mural in front of the Tushita gompa. Rinpoche suggested that Lawrence paint water spurting out of the elephant’s trunk as an offering to Buddha.
Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, at the right Lawrence and his murals behind them.
Lawrence, Wanghuk, and Puntsok.
Having to leave India or be thrown in visa jail (!), we ended up at the famous 5th November Kopan course at Kopan Monastery. Rinpoche was describing and leading meditations on the lower realms in detail, which I found amazing, but Lawrence was having extreme meditations and “seeing” the hells and so on. By the last days of the course, he had a mental breakdown, describing weird psychic visions and so on. After wandering around the mountain villages in Nepal and acting strangely in Kathmandu, he was finally deported back to California. His family helped him be accepted as a patient at various mental institutions.
In later years, Wangchuk and his wife, Puntsok, visited him a number of times, bringing him gifts of paints and brushes.
Even when being taken care of in mental institutions and on antipsychotic meds, he continued to make drawings with little poems that reflected his having been profoundly affected by meeting Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche and having attended the full Kopan course.
Written by Thubten Wongmo. To read more obituaries from the international FPMT mandala, and to find information on submission guidelines, please visit our new Obituaries page (fpmt.org/media/obituaries/).
Please pray that Lawrence may never ever be reborn in the lower realms, may he be immediately born in a pure land where he can be enlightened or to receive a perfect human body, meet the Mahayana teachings and meet a perfectly qualified guru and by only pleasing the guru’s mind, achieve enlightenment as quickly as possible. More advice from Lama Zopa Rinpoche on death and dying is available, see Death and Dying: Practices and Resources (fpmt.org/death/).