IN THE SUMMER OF 1958, Michael Dillon stumbled up a mountain path. Ahead of him a monk jogged, his yellow robe swirling around his strong calves. Dillon struggled to keep up, gasping in the thin air. Below him stretched the shaggy, terraced slopes of the Tista Valley, and the glittering river that cut through the carpet of trees; in the distance, the white peaks of Kanchenjunga, famed mountain of snows, zigzagged into the sky. But Dillon was in no mood to appreciate the scenery.
For weeks, as he sailed toward India, Dillon had been fixated on the Tibetan teacher Dhardo Rinpoche, and the monastery where he had decided to seek refuge. Over and over, Dillon had comforted himself with a fantasy about Dhardo Rinpoche's warm welcome, and the new life he would start up in the monastery, the hours of meditation and chanting, the mental calm. That very morning, Dillon had finally reached Dhardo Rinpoche's compound. He'd arrived rumpled and exhausted from his journey—a ship to a plane to a bus to a taxi-—and he thought surely he'd be hustled in to see Dhardo Rinpoche immediately. Instead, Dillon was left to wait in an antechamber for what seemed like hours. Finally, a monk let him know that the Rinpoche had refused to see him and that he could not stay at the Tibetan monastery after all. Dhardo Rinpoche had instructed Dillon to study among his own kind; he must go live with the English Buddhist who ran a small monastery on top of a mountain nearby. The English monk had been ordained in the Theravada tradition, a sect that stressed conservatism and adhered to the teachings of the historical Buddha. Dillon dreaded the idea of studying with an Englishman, especially one who had no access to Tibetan secrets, those exotic practices that had entranced Dillon ever since he'd read The Third Eye. But he gamely adjusted his expectations and marched up the mountainside, in search of his new teacher.
Michael Dillon (now named Jivaka) on the steps of the monastery in Kalimpong. His guru Sangharakshita sits above him. From Sangharakshita'sprivate collection, licensed by the Clear Vision Trust
The modest red-roofed monastery appeared to be pleasant enough, with its flowers and its vista of mountains that stretched all the way to Darjeeling. As Dillon approached, the young Englishman watched him from the porch. From a distance, the monk could have been an Indian: he wore a yellow robe with one shoulder bare, his head close-shaven, his horn-rimmed glasses obscuring his eyes. Up close, however, Dillon could see the details that marked him as a Westerner: the beaky nose and a certain stern expression about the mouth. When the Englishman spoke, it was with the accent of a working-class Londoner. He introduced himself as Sangharakshita—years ago, he'd discarded his Western name. He told Dillon he was welcome to live at the monastery as long as he performed chores and contributed a small sum for room and board. The rest of the deal was implied: if Dillon stayed to study and learn meditation, Sangharakshita would become his guru.
Of course, what Dillon needed now was not so much a guru as a protector—someone who could hide him from the reporters and photographers, if they should track him here. Dillon wanted to make sure that Sangharakshita was ready for whatever tabloid chaos he might inflict on the monastery. Without much fanfare, Dillon reached into his wallet and handed the monk a creased newspaper clipping. Sangharakshita read it and then glanced up. He told Dillon it didn't matter—he was free to stay.
Within the next few days, Dillon revealed far more, spilling some of his closest-held secrets. Sangharakshita listened to the confessions with preternatural calm, sharing few of his own thoughts. According to Sangharakshita, "He . . . told me that he had an artificial penis, constructed out of skin taken from different parts of his body. He was very proud of this organ, and offered to show it to me, but I declined the offer . . . He also told me that he was taking hormone tablets to promote the growth of facial hair and to suppress menstruation . . . 1 asked him why he had wanted to change his sex (not that such a thing is really possible . . . ). He said there were two reasons. The first that he felt that he was a male soul imprisoned in a female body. The second was that he had been sexually attracted to women and believed this to be wrong."1
In his memoir, Dillon claims that Sangharakshita promised never to repeat his confidences to anyone. "I trusted him because he was both a fellow Englishman and a monk," Dillon wrote.2
Sangharakshita, for his part, insists that he never made any such promise about confidentiality. After all, he was not a Gatholic priest, obliged to hear confessions under a seal of secrecy; he had no professional obligation to protect Dillon.
Right from the beginning, the two men misunderstood each other completely.
That night, after settling into one of the rooms in the monastery, Dillon pulled out his pipe and stood on the veranda. Instead of lighting up, he hurled it out into the darkness, where it tumbled into the abyss of the valley. In the following days, he would hurl his name away, too—the Michael that he'd picked for himself, and the Dillon that had linked him to generations of ancestors. He asked Sangharakshita to rename him—not so much for spiritual reasons as practical ones. Dillon was still convinced reporters could track him down, even on this mountaintop.
So Dillon became Jivaka—a name inspired by the doctor who had attended to the Buddha, in a nod to Dillon's medical skills. Weeks or months later, to complete his disappearing act, Dillon shaved his beard. He removed every last piece of evidence that would mark him as that "sex change" in that newspaper clipping, stripping away all the props that he'd adopted years before to help establish his male identity: the pipe, the beard, the Michael. Jivaka would be another sort of person entirely.
Sangharakshita was born Dennis Lingwood in 1925 and grew up roughhousing with the other working-class boys on the streets of Tooting, London. Childhood heart disease—with two years spent in bed—turned him into a reader and introvert. As a teenager, he plowed through The Diamond Sutra, an ancient philosophical dialogue, and knew at once that he was a Buddhist. Soon afterward, he received his call-up papers from the British army and was shipped off—conveniently enough—to serve in India. After the war ended, he burned his identity card, deserted from the army, took a new name, and set out to do what mattered. Sangharakshita wandered around the country, often on foot, meditating in caves, begging for food, studying Buddhism. In 1950, he received ordination as a Theravada monk. Seven years later, with the help of donations from friends, he'd managed to buy a retreat with several small bedrooms on a mountaintop in Kalimpong.
In the 1960s, about a decade after he met Dillon, he returned to England and eventually founded his own Buddhist sect, promoting practices and doctrines that he felt would be most suitable for his fellow Westerners. The organization, called Friends of the Western Buddhism Order (FWBO), today boasts thousands of followers. Sangharakshita, now in his early eighties, has retired from his leadership of the FWBO.
He remembers his former student Jivaka vividly. Sangharakshita, after all, has written dozens of books, many of them autobiographical; he has made a study of his own past; in fact, Dillon appears in one of Sangharakshita's autobiographies as an odd, troubled character. When Sangharakshita was asked to provide his recollections of Dillon for this book, he sent lengthy e-mail messages that dripped with a strange mix of pity, fondness, and exasperation—as if, even after five decades, he was still carrying on an argument with his former student.
According to Sangharakshita, Dillon arrived at the monastery still very much under the spell of Grandpa Rampa, still believing in the make-believe Tibet of The Third Eye, that fairyland of floating lamas and blue auras. Dillon insisted, too, that Grandpa Rampa had passed on esoteric knowledge to him and that this qualified him to belong to the Secret Order of the Potala, which only had thirteen members—including the Dalai Lama.
Sangharakshita tried to convince Dillon that there was no such secret order. At first, Dillon refused to be talked out of his ideas. He unfurled the proof that the secret order existed—a robe that Rampa had presented to him, and that supposedly conferred membership. Then Dillon gathered the robe around himself, folding it in an origami that Rampa had taught him, and tied it with what appeared to Sangharakshita to be a bathrobe cord.
"But Jivaka, it's an ordinary Burmese monk's robe!" Sangharakshita said.
"No, it's not," Dillon insisted.
Sangharakshita settled the argument by gliding over to a closet and taking out a robe of the same yellow-brown color, identical to the one Dillon wore, right down to the label at the neck.
Eventually, after Sangharakshita argued him out of it, Dillon's trust in Rampa dissolved. With his new teacher's encouragement, he fired off a letter to his former guru, castigating Rampa for telling lies.3
That, anyway, is Sangharakshita's version of events. Were Dillon alive today to tell his own story, his account might be very different. In his own writings, Dillon never mentions the Secret Order of the Potala; nor did he appear to hold any grudge against his old teacher, even at the end of his life. "Much of what [Rampa] told me purporting to be of his own life I now know to be false," Dillon acknowledged, but still "what he said of the universe and man's place in it made good sense."4 And Dillon insisted that his time with Rampa had not been wasted—he still loved the old man.
So it's unclear whether Dillon did come to India convinced that Rampa had inducted him into a secret order of adepts with a special handshake and costume. Of course, whether Dillon fully believed in it or not, the Secret Order of the Potala was an apt metaphor for his situation. Dillon did belong to a secret organization with only about a dozen members worldwide. He did have special knowledge. Unlike nearly everyone else alive during his time, he knew what it was like to live in both a male and a female body. No one around Dillon seemed to grasp that his experience had given him unique insight into the human condition. Dillon himself, then, would have to find other ways to prove he had special powers.
He had grown up an orphan, but now, in India, he had become an orphan in the most profound sense. He had lost not only his family and friends, but also his country and his name. Lie was a man in exile, and he craved, more than ever, to belong to someone or something. At first, he did belong to Sangharakshita, who included him in morning rituals, showed him how to meditate, and assigned him chores.
Sangharakshita was finishing up a book, a memoir that would explain how he'd come from Tooting to live on a mountaintop in India. Dillon became his secretary. Even though he'd been educated at Oxford, versed in Greek and Latin, and had already published his own book, Dillon performed the menial work without complaint. He was eager to please his new teacher: "There was . . . a definite streak of sentimentality in his character and a strong craving for affection."5
During those long, slow afternoons at Kalimpong, in between typing drafts for his guru, Dillon began to work on his own autobiography. In his own manuscript, titled "Out of the Ordinary," he struggled to make sense of all that had happened to him, pouring out the very secrets that he'd come to India to protect. "Michael Dillon" had been snuffed out and replaced by Jivaka—except in the manuscript. Day after day, the pile of delicate onion-skin pages grew taller; inside those pages, Dillon was able to reinvent and reimagine the life he'd just escaped, to make himself the hero of that English existence.
Dillon does not say why he began writing, whether he wanted to set the record straight or simply document an extraordinary life. At any rate, he typed and typed. He lavished special care on his childhood, dedicating many pages to the amber glass of a certain door in the aunts' house and the Victorian gloom of the nursery and the querulous voices of the grown-ups. Just when he'd lost Bobby and Aunt Toto and all of England for good, he found himself washed over with memories of his childhood.
When Dillon stepped away from the desk, he remained a child of sorts. His guru expected him to obey orders, eat whatever he was served, and sleep where he was given a bedroll. He had become Sangharakshita's boy.
Later in his career in India, Dillon would describe the relationship between a disciple and his lama (or guru) in the Tibetan tradition: "The reverence is absolute. The student or disciple makes the triple obeisance each day on his first meeting his Lama; he must never share his master's seat nor sit at a higher level. . . The Lama . . . owns [the disciple] utterly . . . The Lama may treat [the disciple] as he thinks fit, because he will know what is best for his spiritual development."6
Sangharakshita, who practiced in the Theravada tradition, did not demand that kind of extreme deference. Still, he was happy to play the role of master, more Dillon's boss than his teacher. Dillon was isolated on a mountaintop, lost in a land where he could not speak the language, and dependent on Sangharakshita for food and shelter. He began to look up to Sangharakshita in the same way he had once revered Rampa.
Soon the two men had forged an intimate and strange relationship. Dillon began to call his guru "Daddy"—an endearment that Sangharakshita apparently tolerated. "I did not really like [it], especially as he was ten years older than me," according to Sangharakshita. But he didn't tell Dillon to stop.7
Winter came. Sangharakshita would be traveling around India, giving lectures, until the spring. He would not take Dillon along. Instead, he had decided to deposit Dillon in the care of some Theravada monks in Sarnath, as one might leave a boy with trusted friends. Dillon appears to have had little say in the matter.
Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first sermon, sits close to the holy city of Varanasi; it is a popular destination for religious pilgrims, with its collection of half-ruined stupas, towers, sculptures, bas-relief portraits of the Buddha, and warrens of ancient monasteries. Dillon landed here at the end of 1958, staying at the hostel run by the MahaBodhi Society. Several Theravada monks would act as his advisers and allow him to observe their morning rituals in the local temple.
In his letters to Sangharakshita—or "Daddy"—Dillon invented a whole system of nicknames for the august monks of Sarnath. The most senior monk at the local temple, the Venerable Sasanasiri, became H.P., for "high priest"—a nickname that made him sound more American industrialist than religious leader. Sangharakshita notes that Dillon loved such pet names; they were a sign of belonging, and clubbiness, a relic of the elite British boys' schools he was never able to attend as a child.
At first in Sarnath, Dillon ached with loneliness. "You can't make friends when you have nothing in common and no mutual language," he wrote to Sangharakshita.8 His schedule, however, left him with little time to feel abandoned. He arose early for rituals in the temple, then meditated, and studied and wrote for the rest of the day—working as furiously as he ever had in medical school, perhaps even more so.
In Kalimpong, Sangharakshita had allowed his student to read only one or two elementary books on Buddhism. He insisted that Dillon was not ready to tackle the more abstruse teachings. But at the MahaBodhi Society, Dillon found a library of astonishing breadth—it included English translations of many of the Buddhist classics. Dillon crammed, learning about the different sects of Buddhism, the essential tenets of the religion, the history of India. This was something he knew how to do—take in knowledge from the page. With books strewn all around his little monastic cell and notes piling up beside a borrowed typewriter, he began to grow ambitious. Why remain Sangharakshita's typist? Couldn't he aspire to one day enjoy the kind of life Sangharakshita led—as a teacher and author, a Western expert on Buddhism, even a monk?
The tone of his letters to Sangharakshita changed; he sometimes dared to tease and sass his guru. In January of 1959, he asked "Daddy" whether, in his travels, he had found himself "so much in demand as a lecturer still? Or have you succumbed to soft and riotous living?"9
At times, in his long letters, Dillon quarreled with Sangharakshita in the way that one does with an absent friend, taking both sides of the argument himself. Dillon adored Christmas, even though—or perhaps because—he'd spent so many holidays alone. He fetishized those trappings of family Christmases that he'd so often been denied: plum puddings and presents and a big hearty supper surrounded by kin. Sangharakshita had apparently informed Dillon that, as a Buddhist, he would have to give up Christmas, which bothered Dillon immensely. "Master, do you think some of your ideas need a bit of adjusting??? I think there must be a happy medium between your attachment to anti-Westernism and mine to pro-Westernism."10
Still, Dillon was not always so high-handed—indeed he aspired to the kind of humility that the Buddhist texts celebrated. He had begun to realize just how much work he'd have to do to overhaul his mind, to strip it of the snobbishness that had been drummed into him by the aunts and English society. He acknowledged that he found it difficult to make his ceremonial bows before the Sarnath monks who were his superiors. It is hard, he noted, for an Englishman to get on his knees—particularly when he was bending before a dark-skinned man. A rhyme about "dusky Indians" that he'd learned as a child kept going round and round in his head maddeningly, and he could not seem to silence it. Dillon had become aware that his white skin created a barrier to spiritual attainment, and he did his best to cast his privilege away.
"It is not easy to change at my age but that does not mean it is impossible," he wrote to Sangharakshita. "Obviously I've changed a lot in the last six years, * but it is harder [for me] than it was for you . . . since you didn't have the traditions of the British aristocracy rammed into you from the early years. Indeed, for you, reaction meant the opening up of class-consciousness . . . I look forward to the day I can go with you as your junior assistant on one of those tours [to minister to impoverished Indians]—when all of these British prejudices are removed!"11
He had always hungered for badges of belonging: gold braid, uniform jackets, rowing caps, insignia. On the mantel of his house in Ireland, he had placed photos of his rowing team, himself in a line of brothers. Now, once again, he wished desperately to be an insider. But instead of a team or a club, he had set his sights on the Buddhist monastic community, and on the yellow robe that would mark him as a Theravada monk. As much as he'd once longed to wear a sailor's uniform, Dillon now ached for the robe that would allow him to match the other men who sat in rows in the temple. He would melt in among them, and finally, he'd belong.
The first step toward full-fledged monkhood would be to take vows as a novice monk. It was a simple matter to become a novice—any teenaged boy could earn the title by participating in a short ceremony. The supplicant would be presented with a robe and shown how to fold it, then asked to repeat a series of vows, one of which was to abstain from holding property. For most novices—boys who owned nothing besides a few rupees—that promise would be easy enough to keep. For a man in his forties with no steady income nor any family nearby, a man who could not speak the local language nor understand the customs, the vow was tantamount to cutting off a lifeline. Dillon could have bent the rules by asking a friend back in England to hold his money for him, but he did not. He could have reserved an emergency fund, a cushion. Instead, Dillon plunged into his new faith with self-destructive abandon, tossing away all his belongings. He wrote to his lawyers back in England and asked them to give his savings and his inheritances to charity; his trustees were so stunned by their client's request that they dawdled for nearly a year before obeying his wishes. It was an astoundingly reckless move, especially because Dillon had amassed a fortune amounting to twenty thousand pounds by now. The bulk of it he'd inherited from Toto, who had died just a few years before.
Dillon does not say much about what would become one of the most drastic decisions of his life—a decision as irreversible, in its way, as the sex change. He seems to have had no idea just how difficult it would be to survive on his wits in India. He was modeling himself on Sangharakshita, who despite his vow of poverty had nonetheless wound up with a rather enviable writing career as well as proprietorship of a monastic compound. Dillon imagined that he could follow a similar path—he was already churning out articles about Buddhism for papers in India and sending off columns to spiritual newsletters back in England. And he'd banged out a book, too, a sort of Buddhism-for-beginners title, Practicing. He sent out the book under his new name, Jivaka. It was printed only in India—and badly at that. Nonetheless, he'd pulled off a rather remarkable feat for someone so new to life as a Buddhist—after only a few months of study, he'd fobbed himself off as an expert. There was more than a dash of arrogance to Dillon's new pose—clearly, he remained as much a know-it-all as he'd had been when he'd paced around the garage, lecturing Gilbert Barrow about philosophy. At the same time, Dillon had no other way to make money besides becoming an author. "The only possible source of income for me was writing."12 He could not work as a doctor anymore; to do so, he would have to use the name Michael Dillon and risk discovery; furthermore, he'd learned that the Buddha forbade monks from charging money for medical services.
Spring came, and Dillon left Sarnath to return to Kalimpong and take up his life again there as Sangharakshita's protege. He donated his last possessions—the 150 pounds he had left over from ship's wages as well as a gold signet ring—to Sangharakshita's monastery. (Sangharakshita, for his part, denies that Dillon made any such gifts.) Dillon had been looking forward to settling into his old room at the monastery, particularly now that he wore the robe of a novice monk. If he hewed to his vows for a year or so, he might be allowed to take the "higher ordination" and become a full-fledged monk. He expected Sangharakshita would recognize him as someone who could one day become an equal.
The guru did not. As Sangharakshita saw it, Dillon was a woman, and therefore completely unfit to take vows in the male community. To this day, Sangharakshita believes that a sex change does nothing to alter an individual's identity. "Jivaka was not able to beget a child [as a man]. To my mind it is this factor that determines the gender to which one belongs."13
They had an argument: Sangharakshita remembers it had to do with one of the local boys who had come to live at the monastery; Dillon threw a shoe at the guru's new protege. Whatever the reason for the rift, it was inevitable. Dillon chafed under the guru's rules. After a few months, he announced he would leave Kalimpong and return to the hostel in Sarnath, where he had recently enjoyed so much independence. And so, in the fall of 1959, he packed up his meager belongings and left his manuscript, the one that told his secrets, in a trunk that belonged to Sangharakshita.
Dillon returned again to Sarnath, to study and meditate—and to contemplate how he might bend the rules governing who could and could not become a monk. Dillon did not worry about the restriction against women; he assumed that most other Buddhists would regard him as a man, albeit as an unusual kind of man. But he had discovered another law in the monastic code that alarmed him. It forbade anyone who belonged to the "third sex" from the higher ordination. It's not clear what the twenty-five-hundred-year-old religious codes meant by the term third sex—the phrase may have been a catchall for intersexuals, cross-dressers, and gay men. But whatever the third sex might be, the ancient writings made clear that these people could not become monks. Of course, Buddhist law also banned dwarves, epileptics, and even sufferers of boils, eczema, and goiter from the monastic community. Dillon assumed that modern Buddhist leaders must have decided to overlook some of these rules. He asked one of the Theravada monks whether men with war injuries would be barred from ordination and got just the answer he wanted: not anymore.14 That gave Dillon the courage to approach H.P. and other local holy men and confess that he belonged to the third sex (without giving them the details of his situation). Would they give him the higher ordination? The superiors weighed in: the English novice would never become a Theravada monk.
Dillon was devastated. For the rest of his life, he would denounce the Theravada tradition as rigid and hierarchical. It was then that he resolved to switch his affiliation and throw his lot in with the Tibetans. Perhaps the red-robed Tibetan monks would recognize him as a man.
Of course, it was his fascination with Tibetan Buddhism that had drawn him to India in the first place, and during his stay in Sarnath, he had plunged into study of their tradition. Dillon had been lucky to strike up a friendship with Professor Herbert V Guenther, then in residence at nearby Sanskrit university. A German-born professor two years Dillon's junior, Guenther would become one of the preeminent translators of Tibetan Buddhist texts. At that time, he was still a young teacher, happy to chat with anyone who dropped by.
On a sweltering day in November 1959, Dillon arrived at Guenther's office for lunch. That afternoon, the professor spun a tale about a fabled monastery called Rizong. It was located in Ladakh, a country on the Tibetan border. High up in the Himalayas, in an aerie that was nearly impossible to reach, the monks of Rizong practiced Tibetan Buddhism in its most pure and punishing form, adhering rigidly to rules set down centuries before. At Rizong monastery, "if a monk goes out and returns with his robes not absolutely correctly arranged, he gets a nice beating at the gate," Guenther said. "And if [the monks] have been drinking alcohol they get a hundred lashes."15
Guenther had never been to this monastery, which would at that time have seemed an impossible destination; India controlled Ladakh and kept the borders tightly sealed from its rival, China. Certainly, no Englishman would be welcome there. Rather, Guenther offered up Rizong as a fable, a vision of monastic Buddhism taken to its furthest extreme. Dillon accepted the story in that spirit—Rizong, like Tibet itself, seemed as much an idea as it was an actual place.
Over and over during the next year, Dillon would continue to hear rumors about Rizong monastery. The locals told him it was famous for two things: its severe punishments and its fruit trees. Dillon had begun to long for exactly that—a place of strict fathers and sweet rewards.
In March 1959, the Dalai Lama made his famous escape from Chinese-occupied Tibet, climbing vertiginous Himalayan paths to avoid detection by border guards. A week later, Premier Zhou Enlai declared the Chinese-installed government of Tibet to be the true one; Tibet, as a self-ruled country, ceased to exist. Fleeing their homes, Tibet's most talented leaders and intellectuals scattered across India. It was an enormously exciting and poignant time to be a Western student of Tibetan Buddhism in India.
In the fall of 1959—the year Tibet dissolved as a country and began to exist as a dream—Dillon lived in Sarnath, surrounded by glamorous refugees. It was the Tibetans of the Geluk sect, or "yellow hats," who most struck a chord with him. They had been Tibet's philosophers and bookworms—its "Oxford men." And now they had flooded into town to eke out an existence, arriving dizzy with grief and hunger.
One of Dillon's neighbors, Locho Rinpoche, had once taught at Lhasa's top university, where he was considered the reincarnation of a famous scholar. Now he subsisted in abject poverty. "It seemed that my world was falling apart," Locho would write many years later. "I kept thinking of all the things that we had done wrong when we still had a country and went over all the ways we could have avoided the final catastrophe, until I nearly drove myself mad with regret and frustration."16
Dillon venerated Locho and the other Tibetans, without guessing the self-doubt and vertiginous loss these men felt as refugees. "Never could more men of high spiritual development have been found gathered in one place," he wrote.17 The presence of these holy men gave Dillon a new sense of purpose. He suddenly discovered himself to be enormously busy, helping with the preparations for the Dalai Lama's upcoming visit. He provided free medical services to anyone who needed them and labored with the other pilgrims to fashion thousands of butter lamps for endless rituals and prayer sessions the Dalai Lama would attend.
After months of malnutrition, he had become a beaky, bald-headed, emaciated fellow in a frayed yellow robe, his face cleanshaven to reveal the hollows of his cheeks. He lived at the Maha Bodhi Society hostel subsisting on a few rupees—so little that he had trouble paying the postage due when his old tutor Jimmy McKie sent him packages of food from England. "Jivaka seems to have been a misguided idealist and gave whatever assets he had to the [Maha Bodhi] Society," according to Professor Guenther. "Jivaka . . . was a constant guest at our house and we looked after his dietary needs."18
Dillon had grown so thin and sun-scorched that he blended into the crowd of monks swirling through Sarnath. Only those surprising blue eyes set him apart. European and American tourists noticed those eyes and wanted to learn his story. How had he come to be here, in a monk's robe? Would he pose for a photograph? Dillon shrugged them away. One thing was sure: no one W'Could ever recognize him as Michael Dillon. He had reinvented himself as Jivaka, the spiritual seeker with pale skin and an unfathomable past. And now he wanted to go further than any Westerner had ever been.
Dillon aspired to become the first Englishman to belong to the Tibetan monastic community. It was a tall order—to belong to a people whose language he couldn't speak and whose government had dissolved. Even though the cult of Tibet had swelled in Europe and the United States, no Westerner had ever managed to become a monk in that tradition. The high peaks of the Himalayas, the troops patrolling the borders, the language difficulties—such barriers had kept foreigners at bay.
Dillon, however, had reason to hope he might succeed where others had failed. He had befriended a man named Lama Lobzang, who volunteered to become his translator and, indeed, to take on the Englishman as his special project. A pint-size monk in a scruffy, informal summer robe, Lama Lobzang might not look like a power broker, but in fact he knew everyone in Sarnath, spoke a smattering of languages, and could make the wheels turn for people he liked. He held special sway among the Tibetan dignitaries, to whom he brought endless tsompa and tea to keep them from starving. Perhaps most propitiously, Lama Lobzang hailed from Ladakh, the tiny border country near Tibet where one still might find a traditional monastery such as Rizong. As Lama Lobzang saw it, Dillon needed to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist for practical as well as spiritual reasons. The Indian military would forbid an Englishman—a potential spy—from traveling through the Himalayas, and therefore, from living in most Tibetan monasteries. However, if Dillon identified himself as a monk, he might be able to obtain a permit.
Lama Lobzang set to work seeing what he could do to wrangle an ordination tor Dillon; since the Englishman had already apprenticed himself for months as a Theravada novice monk, he was considered a good candidate for full ordination in the Tibetan tradition. Lama Lobzang talked to Locho Rinpoche about performing the ceremony; he must have been persuasive because soon Locho offered to set a date for Dillon's induction into the Tibetan tradition.
Before that happened, Dillon felt duty-bound to inform both Lama Lobzang and Locho Rinpoche that he belonged to the third sex. He did his best to explain the situation in rudimentary Hindi and English. Neither man seemed to regard his status as an impediment to his becoming a monk. But, then again, Dillon wasn't sure they'd understood him. Lama Lobzang spoke only broken English; Locho spoke none at all.
To make sure everything was on the up-and-up, Dillon wrote a letter to Sangharakshita, asking him to come to Sarnath to act as an English-to-Hindi translator and to preside at the ceremony. Somehow, in the months since he'd left Kalimpong, Dillon had convinced himself that Sangharakshita—his "Daddy"—would be proud of him.
*Dillon seems to have considered 1952, when he'd first discovered Ciurdjieft's hooks, as the date of his first step onto the spiritual path. By his count, then, he'd been struggling to retrain his mind for the last six years.