7. Outsider

I spent my late adolescence and the early part of my twenties in various different parts of India, which I eventually left in 1969 when I was twenty-five. I was a young man without family, part of a community of exiles. Some of the time I was reasonably content. Some of the time I was lonely. I was always without any sense of purpose. I spent years half-heartedly studying and then working in admin jobs until finally I encountered His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa in person for the first time, and a seed of motivation was planted within me. It would take years for it to flourish.

When I was eventually released from the tuberculosis hospital in Rajasthan, Ato Rinpoche came to take me to the new location of the Young Lamas Home School, which was now the only home I had in the world, though I was no lama and had no interest in schooling. Freda Bedi had moved the institution out of the stifling heat of Delhi and up to Dalhousie, a beautiful hill town built across five peaks with views of the Himalayas in the distance. It had been a summer retreat for the British during the time of the Raj and there were churches and large houses built in the English style.

I returned to Mrs Bedi’s school knowing that I owed her my life but still unable to fall in line with her imperious way of organizing everyone. I was supposed to be studying but I was very much an outsider, not a lama or even a monk, though not a typical layperson, either. And, of course, we Tibetans were all outsiders in India, though I felt that less strongly in Dalhousie than I had in Delhi because there was already a Tibetan community in exile when we arrived. That was one of the reasons why Freda had picked the place. That and the cheaper rents and blessedly cooler temperatures and cleaner air. It was also not too far from Dharamshala, another former hill station, where His Holiness the Dalai Lama had established his government in exile.

When I followed Ato Rinpoche through the iron gates I saw a large brick and half-timbered house with a verandah and a gabled roof. The colonial villa was the grandest building I’d been in since I left the monastery, and though it was now a little shabby it was still comfortable and had beautiful gardens full of roses.

I was given the job of attending to the young English teachers that Freda employed to teach her beloved lamas. I used to keep them supplied with bread and butter and cups of tea, which they seemed to prefer to Indian food. They were young idealists, most of them with an interest in Buddhism, whom Freda knew from her political and social work. Some of them had been in India for a while, others were recently arrived from England or the States. We used to have lessons out on the lawns as the monkeys that lived in the pine forests screeched above our heads.

There were some peaceful times but not many. I felt dejected and alone. I was resentful of Akong, who had brought me to Delhi and the Young Lamas Home School and then left me there. I missed Jamyang and Trungpa terribly. And I could not tolerate the blind adoration that both Tibetans and the teachers seemed to feel for Freda Bedi, and that she seemed to require. She was an extraordinarily able, energetic and compassionate person, but she was also bossy and demanding. You had to do things her way, and she seemed to me to be too comfortable with flattery. In other words she was a complex human being, like all of us, but I was not willing to see her in those terms. I was too blinkered by my own pride. Our bad feeling escalated into conflict. One day she shamed me by saying that a friend of mine was destined to become a prime minister of Tibet, while I would always remain a nobody because I was not attending to my studies and was disrespectful to my elders. Ironically, that lama emigrated to America, suffered terrible mental health problems and tragically died of his addiction to drugs.

One day I was having a picnic on the lawn with a group of young lamas. We were in good spirits and playing at wrestling one another. I beat one after another and was beginning to enjoy my new status as unofficial wrestling champion when I fell awkwardly with my left hand behind my back. When I stood up I couldn’t feel my left arm at all. Ato Rinpoche took one look and decided it must be dislocated. So he wrenched it back into its ‘normal’ position. That was even worse. So he had another try … I was in so much pain that Freda sent me off with an American teacher to the hospital in Pathankot, where they confirmed that my arm had been broken in two places. Whether that was from the fall or Ato Rinpoche’s attempts to help, I’m not quite sure.

The doctors put my left arm in a full cast and I had to stay overnight in hospital. Despite the discomfort, I was excited to be away from the stifling regime of the school and within striking distance of fun. I had spotted a cinema showing Hindi films as we were walking up to the hospital. The movie billboards with their bright colours and promise of music, romance and drama were calling to me. I decided that I should not miss this opportunity. I was an old hand at hospitals by this point and it wasn’t difficult to time my escape for while the nurses were elsewhere. The ward was on the ground floor so I simply climbed out of a window and sauntered down to the cinema. When I got back to the school the following day, all the tulkus signed their name on my plaster cast and I felt like something of a celebrity.

That was the start of my obsession with Hindi films. From then on I regularly used to slip away from the school and run down into the valley to spend my evenings in the many little movie houses and cafes. I made friends with local boys and flirted with the rich Punjabi girls. I was a bit of a dandy, very proud of a beautiful denim jacket and pair of jeans I’d managed to acquire via one of the young American teachers. I had a full head of curly black hair then, like an Afro. I thought I was quite the thing. I loved teasing the girls and had a habit of sneaking a needle into the cinema with me and stealthily sticking it into unsuspecting girls’ bottoms!

As you can imagine, none of this endeared me to Freda, who was becoming ever more devout in her own practice of Buddhism. So when a letter arrived from Akong suggesting I transfer to a different school for Tibetan refugees, in Mussoorie, Freda leaped at the idea. I was a little sad to leave my circle of friends, both tulkus and local people, but I welcomed the opportunity to start again somewhere new. I was twenty by this point and as restless and unfocused as ever.

Mussoorie is a beautiful hill station in the Dehradun district of the northern state of Uttarakhand. The school was a brand-new venture, founded by a Bönpo lama called Sangye Tenzin whom Akong had met in England. Sangye Tenzin had been invited to teach at Cambridge University and had met an eminent professor there who was fascinated by the pre-Buddhist Bon shamanic religion. The professor became Sangye Tenzin’s pupil and helped him to fundraise for the school.

I spent two directionless years in Mussoorie. I wasn’t sure why I was there, really. I’d only been accepted because I was Akong’s brother. I drifted in and out of lessons and spent most of my time in the town cinema, watching films in Hindi and English. My language skills benefited but I wasn’t achieving anything else. I missed Jamyang. Any time I wondered about what had happened back in Darak, I distracted myself from those thoughts by seeking out company, conversation and flirtation. It worked well enough in the moment but, of course, I was storing up trouble for myself.

When the decision was taken to move the school thousands of miles south to the state of Kerala, where there was a large community of Bon Tibetans, I was very unhappy. Kerala had a swelteringly hot and humid climate and life was hard there as the local population were extremely poor. Then Sangye Tenzin began to teach Bon philosophy and practice as part of our core curriculum, which didn’t sit well for us Buddhist students. When I said that I didn’t want to take part in Bon lessons the teachers said they would expel me. That fired up my rebellious nature and I led a protest by all the Buddhist pupils. We simply refused to come to school. There were only a handful of Bönpo kids and a few teachers left, and the place was forced to close not even a year after it had opened. I had ruined their project.

I’m full of remorse when I look back on my destructive behaviour, but at that time I was essentially selfish and full of pride. I had no interest in learning and no curiosity about Kerala or the people who lived there. The fundamental problem was that I was struggling to process the loss of my family, culture and homeland. It had been six years since I arrived in India and I had no idea what to do with my life. If I were still in Tibet I would have been a monk by now, helping Akong to run Dolma Lhakang. I was glad to have escaped that fate, but this life was hardly more rewarding. I was single at an age when a layperson in Tibet would have been long married. I enjoyed dating when the opportunity arose but had no interest in settling down or starting a family. How could I even contemplate it when I had no sense of my future and knew nothing about myself, or about my own mind?

Naturally I didn’t tell Akong anything about what had happened in Kerala. I just made my way back to Delhi with a small group of other disaffected students. I was twenty-two years old and was surly and miserable.

The Tibetan government in exile paid for our return and then offered to send many of us, including me, to university. By that time the plight of the Tibetan diaspora was attracting a lot of sympathy from all over the world and they had received numerous scholarships from overseas governments. I was more or less given my pick of opportunities. I was crazily fortunate, in some ways, though that future was not necessarily a healthy one for everybody. Many other young Tibetans did go to Europe and the USA but lots of them struggled to adjust to the Western lifestyle and some ended up dropping out and slipping into addiction. I think the Tibetan people were struggling with the legacy of traumatic loss and for some of them it was all too much. It might have been especially hard for the tulkus and other high lamas, because they were treated in the West almost as exotic creatures rather than human beings. The contrast between the feudal society they had come from and the consumerist individualistic culture they encountered was just so enormous. In the West at that time Buddhism was very much associated with the counterculture rather than the mainstream, so many Tibetans, especially the teachers and tulkus, found themselves in a setting where drink, drugs and free love were the norm. They were completely unprepared for this. Often they travelled alone or with just one other companion, so they were isolated and revered at the same time. I certainly found the adjustment very hard myself, when I arrived in Scotland in 1969, and I had a lot of support compared to some others.

When I was offered the opportunity to study abroad at the end of 1966 I turned it down. I wasn’t interested in the West or in further study for its own sake. Instead I opted to stay in Delhi and enrol on a course to train Tibetans in the administration skills required to build and manage the network of camps, schools, hospitals and other facilities for the Tibetan community in India. In Tibet no such training had existed and there was a desperate need for people with these skills. I already spoke good English and Hindi, and I thought this was work that might give me something useful to do.

For the first time in my life, I was right. When I finished the course I was asked which refugee camp I wished to be assigned to. I chose Tashi Jong in north India, where the Tibetan government in exile was buying land for a new settlement. My job was to oversee a programme to teach Tibetans the agricultural skills they needed to farm in India, since the conditions were so different from what we were used to. I helped to set up tea plantations and other farming settlements and I loved the work. Most of the people were from the Kagyu and Nyingma groups, and I felt a particular affinity with them. I was often still very lonely but I was starting to feel settled for the first time in years.

Then I was told that I was going to be transferred to a much larger Tibetan settlement in the south of the country where they badly needed administrative officers. It was a big opportunity, the sort of thing that might have made my career. But I didn’t want to go. I’d had a terrible time in the south of India at the Bon school and, in any case, I was tired of moving around. I’d been transplanted so many times in my life and I wanted to put down some roots. The government official I spoke with wasn’t very sympathetic. I had no idea what to do.

While I was trying to decide, His Holiness the Karmapa visited Delhi. I happened to be there at the time, because I had been dating one of his nieces and I was visiting her. I was very keen to meet him. I’d heard so much about him but I’d never so much as laid eyes on him.

My girlfriend arranged a personal audience. I arrived, full of curiosity and some trepidation. His Holiness was a larger-than-life figure renowned for his extraordinary clairvoyance, charisma and ability to relate to people in just the way they needed. Some found him playful, almost childlike, while others experienced him as terrifyingly wrathful. He was, as I would discover, one of the wisest, most compassionate and powerful people I’ve ever met. He was magnetic.

As I bowed to him I had the disconcerting sensation that he could see into my mind. He spoke as if he’d known me for a long time and knew all my faults. He was extremely severe with me and he was very blunt about what I should do. ‘You bad man,’ he said. ‘What are you doing messing around here? Come to Rumtek with me!’ When I protested that I had a job, that I was supposed to be going to the south to oversee a big project, he ignored me. I felt absolutely frozen to the spot and unable to say anything to resist his argument. But I also felt a deep and instinctive trust that His Holiness knew what was best for me. That, in fact, he knew me, that he had known me over the course of many lifetimes. So I found myself agreeing to go with him, to his monastery. This filled me with nervousness but also deep relief.

I left that encounter and went straight off to ask my employers for a month’s leave. In the end, I never did go to the big camp in the south of India. My career with the government in exile ended there. Instead I spent fifteen months in Rumtek with His Holiness the Karmapa, acting as secretary and translator but being treated more as his son and receiving many teachings. It was an absolutely precious time in my life, though, true to form, I was resistant to much of its transformative effect. At least in the short term.

Within a few weeks of arriving at Rumtek at the end of 1967, I was on my way to Bhutan, accompanying His Holiness the Karmapa on a formal visit to the royal family. The Karmapas had been spiritual advisers to the kings of Bhutan for many hundreds of years and over the course of many successive reincarnations, as they had with the emperors of China. The current king of Bhutan was absolutely devoted to the current Karmapa and invited him for an extended visit. The others in our group were elite monks who were assisting the Karmapa with religious duties. We all had a wonderful time. We were given quarters in the royal palace and stayed there for two months. I couldn’t quite believe my luck. This was a level of comfort and luxury I’d never seen before. After so many years of hardship, it was very welcome.

The king took our group on a pilgrimage of Bhutan’s holy sites. One that particularly moved me was the famous cave called Tail of the Tiger, perched high up on a cliff face, where the great eighth-century master Padmasambhava, or Guru Rinpoche as he is known to Tibetans, sat in meditation.

Guru Rinpoche is particularly dear to us because he brought Buddhism to Tibet from India. His was the large statue in the abbot’s temple in the labrang, back at Dolma Lhakang. He is famous for having tamed the powerful negative forces at work in our country at that time through his skill in turning adversaries into allies of the Buddhist teachings. His speciality was teaching the path of tantra, which flowered in the sixth and seventh centuries CE and became one of the hallmarks of the Tibetan tradition.

The Sanskrit term ‘tantra’ refers to the warp of a loom or the strands of a braid. It also means ‘unbroken continuity’, and refers to our Buddha Nature, that innate goodness and wisdom which can never be tarnished or diminished despite the many troubles that befall us in life. It is like a seamless thread running through all our thoughts, words and deeds, and when we recognize it, our life can change. We then act from a place of inner confidence and clarity instead of lack and confusion. This teaching was to affect me powerfully in later years but at this time I could not really hear it. I was not yet mature enough. It lodged in my heart, though.

When we returned to Rumtek I settled into my new life. The monastery had just been completely rebuilt with the generous help of the royal family of Sikkim, and it was a spectacular and beautiful place. The Karmapas had had a monastery on the site since the seventeenth century but it had fallen into ruin. When His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa fled Tibet he was determined to rebuild this ancient seat of his lineage and had sketched its original design from memory without any recourse to plans or books. It took four years to build and was inaugurated on Tibetan New Year 1966, a year and a half before my arrival.

There were a couple of very comfortable guesthouses and I fancied staying there rather than in the main complex. It would make it easier for me to pursue my leisure activities of gambling, movie-going and chatting up young women. But His Holiness had other ideas. When I told him that I wanted a little freedom because I was a layperson not a monk, he was blunt with me. ‘I will make the decisions, not you! You will stay in the temple!’

That was the tone of our whole relationship. I was constantly pushing for freedom, special dispensations and preferential treatment, and he was adamant that I would do as he said. Though, actually, the Karmapa did single me out and treat me very kindly. The main temple complex only had accommodation for His Holiness and his four Heart Sons, the high lamas who are the Karmapa’s closest disciples and lineage holders. Even the relatives of the Sharmapa, one of the Heart Sons, slept on the floor. But I insisted that I needed my own room and I was allotted a small bedroom next to the Tai Situpa, another of the Heart Sons. I am amazed at my own arrogance when I look back on it now. I always demanded that everything go my way.

My day job was to act as personal secretary to the Karmapa. My administrative skills made me very useful to him. I dealt with correspondence and answered the telephone, which had just been installed and took me a while to get used to. I also acted as his translator with the Hindi- and English-speaking visitors we received. The Karmapa’s fame attracted many students to Rumtek.

As well as working I was receiving instruction from the esteemed Khenpo Thrangu Rinpoche, who was teaching the key treatises of our Karma Kagyu lineage to the four Heart Sons. (A khenpo is akin to someone with a PhD in the West.) The Karmapa asked Thrangu Rinpoche to teach me the Four Foundation practices, which are the core preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan term for them is Ngöndro. They are very vigorous and time-consuming and lay the foundation for the higher tantric practices. The first of them involved doing 100,000 full-body prostrations to an image of the lineage masters of the past. The idea was to develop humility – which I certainly needed then – and confidence in one’s own Buddha Nature as embodied by these great masters of the past.

The second is Dorje Sempa, which is a purification practice that involves reciting a 100-syllable mantra 100,000 times. The main focus here is sincere regret for one’s negative thoughts, speech and actions along with a commitment not to do them again. The third is Mandala Offering, which is concerned with accumulating merit and wisdom. Merit means generating a momentum of positive energy in the mind that provides the context for realizing that all things are interconnected, so not separate and set apart. This realization is wisdom. Merit is generated by offering a symbolic representation of the universe to all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, 100,000 times. The fourth foundational practice is Guru Yoga, which consists of praying with devotion to one’s guru or teacher to receive the grace and blessing that comes from their lineage (in this case the Kagyu lineage). We can use the analogy of a cup to understand how the Four Foundations prepare our mind to receive the higher tantric teachings. The practice of prostrations is like turning an upturned cup over, so that liquid can be poured into it. Dorje Sempa purifies the impurities, as if we are cleaning the cup. Mandala Offering is like repairing any cracks in the cup and then Guru Yoga is receiving the liquid in the cup, or receiving the blessing. Blessing really refers to our mind becoming more positive, through a process I call ‘alchemy’. The aim of the Four Foundations is to provide the appropriate conditions for the alchemy to take place: turning the mud of a negative mind into the gold of a positive one.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I was not a good student. I couldn’t see the point of doing countless prostrations, so I didn’t complete even this first of the four practices. I was nominally a Buddhist but in reality had no interest in deepening my practice, despite the exceptionally privileged position I found myself in at Rumtek, with access to some of the most revered masters. The prostration practice felt more like punishment than anything else. So I would slip away and head off to meet my friends outside the monastery to gamble, or flirt, or drink beer. We used to play cards for hours on end. The only problem was that I was not very good at it, so I lost whatever little money I had.

The Karmapa always seemed to know what I was up to. He would bellow out at the top of his voice, ‘Where is Jamdrak? Where is that scoundrel?’ and then, without waiting for a response, he would send a young monk off to drag me from whichever gambling den or local cinema I was hiding out in. When he’d done this one time too many, he insisted that I carry out the prostrations in the most sacred of all the shrine rooms, where he performed the Black Crown ceremony, a ritual for directly transmitting the energy of enlightened wisdom. The Black Crown had been presented to the Fifth Karmapa by the Chinese emperor Yongle in about 1410 and was said to have been woven from the hair of 100,000 dakinis. (In the Christian pantheon these might be described as angels.) The Black Crown shrine room was right next to His Holiness’s quarters, so there were no more escapes for me. I had to knuckle down.

I spent three months doing prostrations. I would use a mala, which is similar to a rosary, and a small pile of pebbles on the floor to keep track of how many I’d done. Each time I did a prostration I turned over one of the beads on the mala. When I reached the last bead (there are usually twenty-seven of them), I would place one of the pebbles forward on the floor. When I finished my session I would count up the pebbles on the floor and enter the figure into a little book. I managed about 80,000 but my heart wasn’t in it and I learned very little. This was the pattern for my time at Rumtek. I was given so many opportunities that are not normally extended to a layperson, let alone one with so little practice to his name, but I didn’t make full use of them.

Freda Bedi arrived at Rumtek during my time there and was given full ordination by His Holiness the Karmapa. She was the first Western woman to become a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Afterwards she asked to receive the Vajrayogini and Karma Pakshi empowerments, so that she could undertake their respective practices. Vajrayogini is one of the main tantric deities of the Kagyu lineage. She is red-coloured and slightly wrathful. Karma Pakshi is a specific Guru Yoga practice. Before doing these practices you need three things: empowerment, scriptural transmission and teaching on the practice. They can only be imparted by a highly accomplished master such as His Holiness the Karmapa, initially via an empowerment ritual. I too received them, as well as the scriptural transmissions for the various Guru Yoga practices, including Karma Pakshi. I think Freda was a little astounded to find me there, alongside her. I can’t blame her, because the truth is that I was blind to the power of the sacred tantric tradition of Buddhism at that time, though these teachings certainly came to my aid many years later when I was in solitary retreat in New York.

Despite my lack of application, I continued to feel enormous admiration and respect for His Holiness the Karmapa. He was not a man who ever felt the need to explain himself in words, but I felt that he was refusing to give up on me. He saw something in me that I could not. I never lost my sense that he could read my mind, which meant I was always a bit frightened of him. There was something so obviously powerful about him. It was as if he emanated a luminous energy. I also loved and trusted him completely. And he continued to accept me as I was: selfish, closed-minded, rebellious and arrogant. He would allow me to sit cross-legged opposite him as he was making the sacred black pills for which the Karmapas are famous. The secret recipe dates back to the time of the very first Karmapa in the twelfth century. The pills are given to people at the time of death and are believed to help the person’s consciousness navigate the bardo – the forty-nine-day interval between death and rebirth. One day when I was sitting at his feet I cheekily asked him for some pills. Nobody else would have been so irreverent, but I didn’t know (or care) anything about protocol. He just laughed and amazingly, considering how precious they are considered to be and how inappropriate a person I was to receive them, he actually gave me one large pill and five small ones. I have given the small ones away over the years, but I still have that large precious pill on my shrine.

To add to my increasing ambivalence about being at Rumtek, I kept meeting young Westerners, who were arriving in ever-greater numbers. As well as those who were very committed to deepening their Buddhist practice there were Peace Corps volunteers and hippies fascinated by Eastern religions and the search for Enlightenment. I had met mostly English people at the Young Lamas Home School. Now I met people from the United States and all over Europe as well. My curiosity about the outside world was growing, alongside my restless sense that I could not stay in Rumtek.

So after I’d been there for almost a year I wrote to Akong, asking him to help me. I had decided that I wanted to go and join him and Trungpa. They had recently founded Samye Ling in Scotland. Named after Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, it was the first Tibetan Buddhist centre outside Asia. Could Akong send me the money for the airfare and help me to get the necessary travel documents to leave India? My brother was keen for me to join him and wrote to the Karmapa asking him to release me. His Holiness was absolutely furious, with both of us. He replied to Akong that it was his choice to keep me at Rumtek and that Akong should do nothing to help me to leave. He said it was his business how he treated me, not Akong’s. At the time I felt a bit like his property, though I now appreciate that His Holiness wanted me to stay because he already had plans for me. In any case, my brother stopped communicating with me from then on.

I think it was this that cemented my determination to leave. I could not abide the feeling that I was not free. Ironic, since I had closed my mind to the most profound teachings that would have brought me to true freedom. But it simply wasn’t my moment to receive them.

It might seem that I missed endless opportunities to learn, to choose the path towards ordination as a Buddhist monk that I eventually took. But looking back, I do not see it that way. I was learning about other matters, such as the addictive pull of material things and the trap of self-indulgence, which have been necessary in order for me to become an effective teacher here in the West. I prefer to see seeds of positive change that were sown and that have flourished eventually, often in surprising ways.

Many of us struggle not to look back on our pasts and castigate ourselves for having failed to grasp an opportunity, learn a lesson or appreciate how lucky we were. Why did we miss our chance? Why did we choose to remain stuck? I meet many people who have struggled with lifelong mental health issues, deep sadness or addiction. They are often filled with regret and self-hatred. When we first meet they seem to assume that I have always been content in myself and sure of my vocation. I laugh and tell them that until I was thirty-seven years old I was a mess. My mind was all over the place. Change is a complex process and we must give it time. So long as we persist in sowing those good seeds, nurturing them as lovingly as we can, and treat our past and present selves with deep compassion, we will find that we have been moving in the right direction.

Just over a year after his first visit His Holiness the Karmapa was once again invited to stay with the Bhutanese royal family. This time I remained behind to help with the running of the monastery. Then I got word that Trungpa had returned to India for the first time since his departure. He had been studying with many different masters and would be coming to Rumtek. I was overjoyed to see my old friend. It had been six years since I’d spent much time with anyone I’d been close to in Tibet. Trungpa was his old self: jolly and warm, funny and brilliant. I implored him to take me with him, back to the UK. He knew all about Akong’s exchange with His Holiness the Karmapa but he was never one to follow orders, and he agreed immediately.

After he’d set off for Delhi I took a fifteen-day leave of absence from Rumtek and went to stay with him. Through his connections to the Canadian High Commission, I managed to get a visa to England. My only form of identification at the time was an Indian identity card. Sorting out the papers would probably have taken years without Trungpa’s help but it was all managed very quickly. My brother sent me the money to buy the airfare, reluctantly since he did not want to go against His Holiness the Karmapa’s wishes. But I didn’t care. I sent word to His Holiness the Karmapa that I was leaving India and that was that. I was twenty-five years old and I felt free.

My departure from India was luxurious compared to my arrival, nine years previously. Early in 1969 Trungpa and I boarded a plane for Paris. Trungpa wanted to stop off there on the way to Scotland, to see a girlfriend. I was rather taken aback by this because I had always known him to be a celibate monk. But as I had discovered during our chats in Delhi, young people in the West were rejecting the old ways and exploring alternative lifestyles, values, politics and spirituality. Trungpa, with his natural authority, charisma and boundless curiosity, was very much part of this movement. He was nearly thirty by this point and had been in England since 1963, watching the social upheavals of the sixties up close. He was increasingly rejecting traditional Tibetan ways, though his faith in Buddhism and love for the Dharma had not and would never falter. He told me that his recent time in India and Bhutan had merely consolidated his belief that he must shed some aspects of his religious identity should he become an effective teacher of Buddhism in the West. He had decided to return his monk’s vows to His Holiness the Karmapa. He was now a layperson. All of this, not to mention his stories of indulging with alcohol and many girlfriends, was slightly shocking to me but exciting. I loved Trungpa deeply and trusted that he would be my guide to this new phase of my life. As would Akong, of course. My heart sank a little at that prospect.