The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
When his work is done, the people say,
“Amazing; we did it, all by ourselves!”
—LAO TZU
I had shown up as usual for my Tibetan lesson and was surprised to find a crowd of monks and laypeople milling around the apartment building. The commotion seemed focused just upstairs from my tutor Tashi Samphel’s place. Word was that a famous Tibetan yogi had come to Sarnath for the big puja that was happening the next day, and all his disciples in the area were gathering to pay their respects.
“We should go upstairs and see him,” Tashi-la said. “You should get his blessing. He is a great meditator.” I was curious. I had been urged to meet any number of Buddhist VIPs who came to Sarnath on pilgrimage. They tended to be scholars or ritual masters who held high rank within the various Tibetan Buddhist lineages. I had yet to encounter anyone resembling the legendary Tibetan meditators.
We joined the flow slowly milling up the stairs, and I gleaned a bit more information about Drubwang Konchok Norbu Rinpoche on the way up. “He’s very eccentric. They say he spits on people…You never know what he might do. He might punch you or slap you.” I wasn’t worried. In my wanderings I had encountered many yogis and sadhus who talked about, or even emulated, crazy wisdom masters. Eccentricity would not scare me off.
We squeezed in with at least half a dozen other supplicants. The room was barely furnished, with a single bookshelf that had a very simple shrine arranged, and a narrow bed that also served as a meditation seat, where Drubwang Rinpoche sat facing us. He had a huge mass of gray dreadlocks piled like a turban on his head. His fingers, resting on the rough blanket on his lap, had nails that curled like horns, a few inches long. He looked straight at me with a softly pensive expression.
There was no ceremony, no one was nudging me to observe Tibetan protocol—now is the time to offer the khata, now you do prostrations—as I had experienced on meeting with other teachers. And yet I felt an overwhelming and spontaneous urge to honor him. So I did what felt natural to me, bowing deeply to touch his feet in the Indian way. A few words were exchanged over my head, but they flew by too quickly for me to make out what was said, or maybe it was the Ladakhi spoken by the attendants. I was oddly nervous, though I couldn’t say why.
When I got up he looked straight into my eyes. I felt like I was being x-rayed, naked to the bone. He gestured for me to come closer. A hush fell over the room, as if everyone’s breath stopped, not just mine. He grabbed my head with both his hands. I could feel the scratch of his nails beyond his fingers’ tight grip. He brought his face up close above mine, then lowered it and rested his forehead on top of my head. The weight of his dreadlocks rested on my head. I was used to the traditional Tibetan greeting that touches forehead to forehead, but this was something else entirely.
I felt like I was dissolving. My body was trembling—no, vibrating. I could feel his breath on my face as he recited something, but the sounds didn’t register as meaning. My mind was blank, completely blank for a stretch of time that I couldn’t measure. Then he lifted his head and gently pushed mine back, separating us as if he had just unplugged me from an electric socket. All that was left was a sense of clarity, as if a cloudy sky had cleared to blue. There was a familiarity and a certainty too in that clarity. It was a distinct feeling that would last for several days and then gradually fade, though the taste remains in memory even now.
He said nothing, just gave me the subtlest of smiles. Somehow I left the room and made my way downstairs. The attendants and a handful of others followed me out, and we gathered outside. Nobody said a word. I wasn’t the only one who seemed to be in a state of shock. Then the tension broke and we were laughing and smiling and some were saying, “Well, that was wonderful!” Others were saying, “Unbelievable!” I was trying to figure out what had just happened, wondering if anything that was said in the room might hold an explanation.
I asked one of the attendants what he thought, and he said “It’s beyond me. I’ve never seen anything like it. Usually he gives blessings by flicking a hand or gently touches the head and blows on you. Sometimes he spits instead of blowing, that’s a blessing too.” He said it had lasted for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. It hadn’t felt that long, but I wasn’t in any state to mark time accurately. Everyone agreed that something special had happened, though no one quite knew what. In any case, it seemed worth celebrating, so I bought a round of mango Frooti juice boxes for all of us from a nearby stall.
Whatever else he’d done to me, he had certainly grabbed my attention. I wanted to learn more. Between his students and others I met in the Tibetan and Ladakhi community, there was no shortage of stories about him floating around. For all the dramatic flurry of his disregard for the normal ways of the world, every story pointed to a radical integrity that made sense of his eccentricities.
He had no interest at all in the complex hierarchies of the Tibetan religious world, though all doors were open to him. He was well known to all the prominent heads of lineages, deeply respected by all, but he seemed to have no awareness of, let alone concern for, recognition and the markers of status: who was building the bigger monastery, or traveling to teach in the West, or publishing books. These were all vagaries of samsara in his view, even if they went under the label of Dharma. He was, however, absolutely devoted to the Dalai Lama. At one time when His Holiness was teaching in Ladakh, Drubwang Rinpoche showed up in the midst of the session and started doing prostrations. Not the modestly abbreviated form that most elderly people or anyone in an overly crowded room would do. No, he did an extreme version of the full body prostrations known as “the tree falling”—ba-boom!—dropping hard on his knees and then throwing himself out flat on the ground. Not just the requisite three times, but over and over again. His Holiness continued teaching with Drubwang Rinpoche pounding the floor—ba-boom! ba-boom! ba-boom!—in a corner of the assembly. Finally, with a look of concern, as if he feared the old man might have a heart attack, the Dalai Lama stopped and said, “Rinpoche, that’s enough…enough now!” At that Drubwang Rinpoche finally took a seat.
I was told that he was one of very few people who could come and go from His Holiness’s residence at will. The security detail had a standing order not to stop or question him. Drubwang Rinpoche wasn’t the type to schedule appointments. He had shown up once with a large bag of cash—accumulated donations from his own followers—and dumped it out in a pile on the table, saying to His Holiness, “You travel a lot, you do a lot of good work. You have more use for this than I do.” And then he walked out, not waiting for thanks.
That untethered relationship with money was a constant worry for the students who were closest to him. One day they felt the need to finally intervene. They had been on the road earlier, with Drubwang Rinpoche in the front seat of the Jeep, his dreadlocks polishing the ceiling with every bounce, when they passed a man selling small clay statues of the Buddha on the side of the road. It was a common sight in Sarnath, where pilgrims promised a potential market. Drubwang Rinpoche insisted on stopping and inspected the statues, enthusiastically pronouncing them “Good, good, good, good.” He picked one out and asked the price. The vendor quoted a thousand rupees and Drubwang Rinpoche handed him the cash without a moment’s hesitation, let alone any attempt to bargain him down. The students were seething. The little statue, cast by the dozens out of the cheapest material, was worth no more than twenty rupees maximum, and even a clueless tourist would have known better. The vendor had cheated their teacher shamelessly; the shame was theirs for letting it happen.
I watched him rearrange his shrine that afternoon to make room for the clay statue, as excited as a little kid with a wonderful new toy, though I left before the big drama unfolded and learned about it afterwards from his students. One of the senior attendants was delegated to confront him. That took serious courage. Not only was Drubwang Rinpoche wildly unpredictable, he was said to have the power to take on wrathful forms. Nobody knew exactly what kind of wrathful forms, as people around him tended to shut their eyes in terror whenever things started to get crazy. So the attendant very tentatively, with eyes cast down and bowing low, said to him, “Rinpoche, the statue that you bought today…the statues they were selling on the road…those are clay statues.”
Rinpoche looked at him. “So what?”
“You know, Rinpoche, they are worth twenty rupees. You gave him a thousand rupees…” And then the attendant squeezed his eyes shut quickly, because Rinpoche was suddenly very much larger than life.
“And you are a monk?” he shouted. “You are a monk?” He grabbed his cloth bag and pulled out a generous fistful of cash, rupee notes of all denominations, that followers had given as offerings. “This,” he shouted, waving it high, “is paper! And this”—he gestured to the statue now in a place of honor on his altar—“is Buddha! It doesn’t matter if it’s clay or gold, it is still Buddha, our teacher. This is who gave the Dharma, this is who will get us enlightened!” He tossed the cash in the air—“Will this get you enlightened?” It showered down like so much worthless confetti.
A couple of months after our encounter in Sarnath, I happened to spend some time attending teachings in Dehradun. I knew that Drubwang Rinpoche lived nearby at a small hermitage near the falls at Sahastradhara, and I wanted very much to see him again. I joined the line of Tibetans and Ladakhis waiting to see him, every one of them reciting mantras under their breath, nervous with anticipation. An attendant tried to shoo me in ahead of the others, but I kept to my place. I fully intended to stay for a while, and not just pass through quickly for a blessing like most.
When I entered the hut, he was once again sitting on a narrow bed wrapped in a blanket. There was a thangka painting on the wall behind him, a shelf with a couple of books and a very simple shrine. A small table held a wooden cup and a prayer wheel. That was it. But the room was somehow filled with his majestic presence. He told his attendant to shut the door and he gave me that subtle smile again. We spoke through the attendant, who translated into Hindi, as I couldn’t follow his dialect.
“Why have you come?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good. It is good not to know. So what do you want?”
“I’d like to receive teachings.”
“I don’t teach.”
“That’s fine, can I just stay here?”
He looked around, as if measuring the space. “I don’t have any room.”
“I’ll find a place to stay in the monastery.”
“Good. Go and meditate on impermanence. If you understand that, you will understand everything.”
I tried asking him how to go about it, hoping for specific instructions, but even more just hoping to continue the conversation. He answered, very gently, “You know that already. Don’t ask me. Just go do it. If you have questions, come back later.” I did come back, as often as I could manage it. With his blessing, his students shared with me some of the instructions he had given them, and I spent a good portion of my time in Dehradun and later practicing what they had shared. But more than anything I wanted to use my time there to just soak up his presence.
His claim that he didn’t teach was more deflection than truth. He was well-known for teaching the mantra that was familiar to all Tibetans: om mani padme hum. His emphasis on that one formula was strategic. People tended to seek him out for reasons he didn’t particularly want to encourage. Tibetans wanted him to confirm auspicious dates, heal ailments, or clear obstacles that stood in the way of success. They wanted to learn about their past lives or be reassured about future ones. Other teachers came asking for him to give the most advanced of esoteric teachings, and he deflected humbly, claimed he didn’t have those skills. Foreigners came asking too, even if they weren’t particularly eager to take on the prerequisite commitments. They wanted him to interpret their dreams, which had seemed so remarkable in the dark of night, but to which he would only say, “It’s a good dream. But just a dream. Now go practice.”
He sent them all back to the essentials. The recitation of the mantra om mani padme hum was the most ordinary practice, universally accessible. The phrase was visible everywhere—carved into stones, spinning on prayer wheels, fluttering on flags in the wind—and repeated by all, mumbled softly or silently rehearsed. That invocation of the Jewel-Lotus cut to the most essential core of the Buddha’s teachings: a lotus flower rooted in the mud of our existence, rising out of that murky pool to unfurl its petals in unsullied perfection and reveal at its heart the jewel of the enlightened mind—the Buddha’s reality, our own potential—nirvana contained within samsara, the impulse to boundless compassion indistinguishable from wisdom’s emptiness. There was nothing in all of Dharma, he insisted, that was not somehow packed into those six syllables sacred to Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, and in their unpacking he was a gushing fountain, the words pouring out like spontaneous poetry in a fulgent stream that left his translator gasping for some fraction of a pause to interject.
His style of teaching was very different with those students who were seriously committed and who, in many cases, had spent years meditating in retreat. It was a conversation. Questions would generate long pauses, and then he would slowly start to talk. Sometimes I sat in the corner for long stretches of time while nothing much was said. Sometimes he would just look at you. I imagine a context that was much the same when the Buddha originally taught: a gathering of a handful of students within a culture where learning happened through observation and emulation. Teaching arose organically through conversation, rather than as sermons composed for an occasion. Students held the spoken words in memory, condensed them into verse, and wove them into lifestyles and practices. Even more essential than the words remembered, filtered, and reconstructed, was the teacher’s presence.
In the Jewish tradition, it’s said that the disciple must learn from the actions of the teacher, even if it means following him into the outhouse. The sage’s behavior is Torah to be read. You learn by observing how a teacher relates to the world around him, even—or especially—in the most mundane details. That kind of learning might well evade being captured by language. The living exemplar embodies the lesson with more nuance, more integrity and resilience in the face of the unexpected than words can ever deliver. Somehow we have lost that learning tradition. Spontaneous teachings appear to the left and right of us in exchanges that we rarely pay full attention to, let alone preserve in a way that we can pass on to others with awareness and respect.
What I saw in Drubwang Rinpoche in his every moment of engagement was a simplicity, childlike but far from naïve, that shone with a light of conscious choice. He was functioning in this world but he was not bound by its rules or priorities. His own priorities were absolutely consistent and only seemed eccentric when viewed through the lens of worldly sensibilities. He embodied a spiritual practice that was entirely pure in its motivation. He seemed to have erased all transactional calculations from his mind, and it was only the contrast with everyone around him that made him seem odd.
So much of our spiritual life involves an estimation, however subtle or barely conscious, of what our time and effort is worth: What am I going to get out of this? It’s a salesman’s trick. If I meditate for twenty minutes, if I carve out time for this retreat, if I shell out for a ticket for this teaching, what is my return on investment? The absorption of meditation and mindfulness practices into the mainstream has entirely repackaged spiritual motivation in terms of this cost-benefit analysis. We now have bullet points, features, and benefits to deflect us from the path: Learn to relax, lower your blood pressure, improve your focus, increase your productivity. If we haven’t yet caught the bug, employers will offer incentives. We have apps to conveniently quantify our progress, and spur us to compete. The tech industry has been the most eager to convert spiritual practice into a life hack. They are early adopters by nature; others quickly follow.
If meditation and mindfulness in the grip of late-stage capitalism have become tools to boost productivity, in the hands of psychotherapists they become tools for managing emotion. They protect and shore up a fragile ego instead of serving to shatter it purposefully. They render samsara less unpleasant rather than pointing us toward liberation. Renunciation seems irrelevant when our capacity for tolerating the world’s suffering and our own is so well enhanced. The medicine that should lead to awakening is being prescribed off-label as an anesthetic.
Drubwang Rinpoche would have seen the flaws of such thinking immediately. We, on the other hand, will have to expend a lot of effort to unlearn the messages about meditation that are broadcast from all corners. If I choose to say very little about the actual practice of meditation in these pages—or more precisely, the innumerably many practices that go under the label of meditation—it is because I don’t want to add more noise to this cacophony. Beyond advertising the benefits of meditation, more than enough words and trees have been spent describing specific practices in detail. What is needed more urgently is attention to the motivation, the discipline, and the sense of purpose that creates a nest for the practice and will ultimately determine its outcome.
Like every other aspect of spiritual practice, meditation ideally is exploratory and experimental. We have learned to think of discipline as just showing up, the seat planted consistently on the cushion. Not playing hooky is a childish definition of discipline. A deeper discipline consists not in hammering away at the same problem with the same tool held at the same angle, but in our ability to self-correct. When we are stuck, can we find a detour to circumvent the obstacle without running off on a tangent? When we meet with unfamiliar terrain, can we explore without losing sight of the path? When we learn something new, and realize that it contradicts what we learned earlier, can we erase and redraw the map? The ability to adjust course is fundamental to the pursuit of wisdom.
Drubwang Rinpoche had told me to meditate on impermanence, and his students shared with me precisely how that was expressed in the Drikung Kagyu school. Each lineage has its own style of practice, the summation of many individual masters’ experiences. Each has its particular language and unique poetry that sparks a glimmer of recognition in the student and illuminates the next portion of the path. But impermanence is a universal, the very ground the path traverses. Death brings us down firmly onto that ground in a way that never fails to impress the mind.
I chose to spend a lot of time in Varanasi at the ghats on the shore of the Ganges where the cremation pyres burned day and night. The dead of all shapes and sizes—small children, young men and women in their prime, the withered elderly—all revealed the specifics of how flesh and hair and skin, fat, sinews, guts, and bone each respond to the rapid oxidation of flame, and how the body emphatically becomes less than a person, merely material, and is finally reduced to a pile of ash and a few odd bits of bone.
I watched as the full spectrum of samsara’s human drama played out around the undeniable physical facts. Some family members stayed briefly, some for hours. The sound of wailing, raw with loss and pain, rose above the cracking and roar of the fire. Some wept quietly. Others watched stoically. They unpacked bundles of worry in a few telling words with heavy faces lit by the movement of the flames: about the cost of the funeral, about whatever new configuration of domestic burden or debt this death would trigger. Others were happy to see the old curmudgeon finally gone, or were calculating their inheritance before the embers had died.
It got quieter at night. Sometimes I would stay until the early hours of the morning, watching the fires slowly burning down. On some nights a few tantrics would come late to practice. Sometimes they were drunk and rowdy, yelling foul language. Sometimes they were otherwise intoxicated. Eventually they would quiet down and settle into meditation. As I watched the embers of a life glowing in the darkness, I thought about impermanence.
This body will inevitably die and decay; it’s a simple fact. Attachment to something that is absolutely certain to fail us is a pretty stupid response. At the same time, this body is the instrument for our every interaction with the world, the vehicle for every human connection, every relationship in our lives. When a person dies, it’s their body that shimmers in our memory and that empty shell seems to contain all other traces—the stories, the voice, the mannerisms and behavior that were uniquely theirs. Even when physicality is gone, we cling to the chimera of the body.
I could go on: The way that a body’s appearance biases our interactions until death levels us all. How, even after I had offered my body in service to the Dharma when I was in Pokhara, I still instinctively clung to it, if a little bit less than I might otherwise. How we normalize the fear of death’s separation and loss even as we practice to face it squarely. But then something happened that brought all this home from the realm of contemplation and made it real in the most intimate way.
My grandmother died. At the age of ninety-six, she was living in the twilight zone of Alzheimer’s disease, though she somehow still knew intuitively even before I arrived that I was coming to visit, even when little else made sense to her. She chose her time too, just hours after my sister Shefali’s wedding had concluded. As if she knew that a day sooner would have upset everything and forced a year’s postponement of the celebrations. As if she was still taking care of all of us. I had played the role of the eldest son responsibly in every respect, navigating a path that would satisfy family and tradition as well as the very discerning and determined young lawyer who was the bride. I had spent countless sleepless nights up to my neck in arrangements for 2,500 guests, and then danced and sang and partied for three more nights. The next day I found myself standing on the shores of Mother Ganga, carrying my grandmother’s body to the pyre. I watched as the flames consumed her work-hardened hands and the feet I would bow down to touch every morning that we were together. I watched as her tattoos disappeared slowly into the black char and all the toothless kisses and silly dances went up in smoke. I saw that none of what mattered—the expression of love, the affection, respect, and devotion—would burn away with this corpse. It seemed perfectly right in that moment to celebrate a death with a wedding, to honor human connection and the promise of life continuing.
Four years later, I crossed paths again with Drubwang Rinpoche, this time in Kathmandu. As always he sat wrapped in a blanket on a narrow bed. From the thangka painting behind him, Mahakala glared fiercely at me, wearing a crown of skulls and trampling a corpse, his black the blackness that sucks in all colors but also the emptiness from which they emanate. His eyes bulged in wrath, just like those images at the temple in Pokhara that had once seemed so alien and forbidding, but I knew now that this was a guardian and protector and his dance with death was nothing to fear.
Drubwang Rinpoche looked quite different from when I’d seen him last. He had cut off all his dreadlocks the year before, which caused a storm of consternation. Typically, when a yogi of his stature cuts off his hair, it’s a sign that his death is imminent. The response was a concerted campaign of long-life prayers, including one composed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and fervent pleas for him to stay alive long enough to teach another generation of students. “I don’t know what all the fuss was about my haircut,” he told me. “It was just getting too heavy.” I suspect the truth was that he was so thoroughly at ease with the prospect of death that lightening his physical presence in preparation was an entirely natural step. It was certainly no reason for concern. Ever unpredictable, he remained with us for another three years.