Ken McLeod’s most recent book is Reflections on Silver River. The interview took place at my home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2009. Zenshin Michael Haederle participated.
BOYLE: Can you tell us how you got started with Buddhism?
MCLEOD: I was at university in the 1960s in Canada. Early on in high school I had a definite interest in trying to find some depth in Christianity, and read things like [John A. T. Robinson’s] Honest to God, a bit of Paul Tillich, and a few others—Whitehead, for example—but it didn’t really lead me anywhere. Then at university—the University of Waterloo—I dropped all of that. Around the third year I began to look into Buddhism and other Eastern religions a bit, but it was very difficult to find much stuff in those days. I did happen across D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Mahayana Buddhism and Zen. I think I may have come across [Philip Kapleau’s] Three Pillars of Zen—I’m not sure.
I was engaged to be married, and I was fairly active in the New Left, there in Waterloo. I received a scholarship to do a Ph.D. in mathematics, in England. My fiancée said (and I should have taken this as a warning sign), “While you’re getting your Ph.D., do you mind if I cycle around the continent?” I thought that was kind of a cool idea, so I ended up trashing the scholarship. One thing led to another, and we ended up in Tehran, where I had hepatitis A. We thought,
What the hell are we doing? We decided we would go to India and learn something about meditation and then find our way back to Canada. Someone gave us the name of a Buddhist mission outside Delhi, and when we got there a Dutch nun, a Buddhist nun, gave us the name of Kalu Rinpoche in the West Bengal-Darjeeling area. So we went to see Kalu Rinpoche. We’d done a little bit of reading on the way, but we didn’t know very much about Tibetan Buddhism. Somehow we were sufficiently impressed with Rinpoche’s presence that we stayed, and just became progressively more involved. I learned Tibetan. That was 1970.
HAEDERLE: What was it like when you first encountered Kalu Rinpoche?
MCLEOD: Well, he had a monastery a few miles outside of Darjeeling, outside a small town called Sonada. He had an afternoon class for Westerners. Westerners rented places around, and practiced and showed up for teaching. That’s what we did. I think that what Rinpoche said then basically sums it up. He said, “Now you’ve taken refuge, I’m your father. Now learn Tibetan.” That’s totally congruent with the family model of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. He becomes your spiritual father, you move into a spiritual family, you move out of your birth family, and that’s it.
BOYLE: So the first important period was when you met Kalu Rinpoche and stayed there for nine months, learning Tibetan and studying with him. What about him made you want to immerse your life in this? Why would you take refuge?
MCLEOD: It made sense. I mean, I didn’t have any mystical experiences or a feeling that I had encountered my teacher from a previous lifetime, or anything like that. There was nothing magical, mystical, or mysterious. Clearly I was looking for some kind of meaning, and this presented a path. There were things you could do. There was a whole technology, a set of practices, a lot of stuff you could learn in a way that Christianity didn’t offer. Protestant Christianity didn’t present things in that way. So we started learning stuff, and doing the practices. And I was hopeless, completely.
BOYLE: Did he speak English?
MCLEOD: No. There was a translator there who knew more Tibetan than I did at that point. By the end of nine months I was just beginning to be able to converse. I didn’t take any formal training in Tibetan. It was all out of dictionaries, old grammar books that had sat in Calcutta warehouses getting eaten by worms, things like that.
BOYLE: Were you comfortable during this time, as opposed to the stories some people tell about going into a Japanese monastery and being almost tortured?
MCLEOD: There was no test of your devotion or intention, or anything like that. The first meeting I had with Rinpoche, he said, “Are you here as a tourist or are you interested in Buddhism?” I said, “I’m interested in Buddhism,” and that was that.
BOYLE: But you spent a great amount of time in meditation?
MCLEOD: Heavens no. When I first started I literally could not sit for more than a minute. The reason for that only became clear to me many, many years later. Then I learned of a practice where you did prostrations called ngöndro, and that sounded like something I might be able to do. Ngöndro means “groundwork.” It’s a set of four practices that prepare you for other forms of meditation, mahamudra in particular. You go for refuge, doing a full prostration for every refuge prayer, 100,000 times. Then you do a purification practice, reciting a mantra 100,000 times while you imagine being purified by a deity. Then 100,000 offerings of the universe to all the buddhas of the three times. And finally, 100,000 prayers to your guru or teacher while you cultivate intense devotion. I think I was the first of Rinpoche’s students to actually do the prostration practice, ngöndro.
BOYLE: You began doing that during this nine-month period?
MCLEOD: Yes, both my wife and I finished all four sections of the ngöndro during those nine months. Full prostrations. I’ve done them four more times since then. But there were lots of things we didn’t know about practice. My wife said at one point, “I didn’t know you were meant to be focusing on the purification of your body, I thought you just said the words of the mantra.”
BOYLE: And you had conversations with Rinpoche during that time?
MCLEOD: Yes, but they were just conversations.
HAEDERLE: What was he like?
MCLEOD: Kalu Rinpoche never raised his voice above a whisper. Ever. He was a very patient person, explained things quite clearly. He stressed very fundamental aspects, so anytime a new Westerner showed up we’d all go back and start at the beginning, again. We heard that basic talk any number of times. He taught very traditionally, the Tibetan cosmology and so forth. I realized later that he took us through a good part of one of the standard texts in the Kagyu tradition, which is the Jewel Ornament of Liberation. He was very open, in that he taught Westerners quite willingly, not like a lot of Tibetan teachers at that time. And he took them seriously as students.
BOYLE: In spite of the repetition, you had a sense that this was going somewhere?
MCLEOD: Yes. In the Tibetan tradition one of the pervasive frameworks is a thing called
lamrim, which means graded path, or series of steps on the path. There is a whole genre of texts, which are
lamrim or graded path texts. It is probably the primary pedagogical framework used in all the Tibetan traditions. You start with basic teachings on human birth, death, and impermanence;
samsara; the six realms [of existence]; and progress to things like the four immeasurables—loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity—then the meditations of taking and sending and compassion, up to the six perfections,
bodhichitta. All of those things. That can be done very concisely or it can be done in great depth. From there you might be introduced to other aspects of practice. Rinpoche encouraged people to practice a Vajrayana meditation in which you identified with being the embodiment of awakened compassion, the six-syllable mantra,
Om mani padme hum. This was very close to Rinpoche’s heart.
BOYLE: You covered this, or at least got a taste of it, during that nine-month period?
MCLEOD: Oh yes. Ingrid and I did all four sections of ngöndro and the Chenrezig practice. We were introduced to some other meditations too, but those were the principal ones. Then a year later Rinpoche did his first North American tour. He said he was going to the West, and would I be able to assist with that? I didn’t have any money, so I wasn’t sure what I could do to assist him. But my parents wrote a letter, which allowed him to get a visa to Canada. Then my wife and I took a huge amount of stuff to Delhi, which was sent through diplomatic courier to Canada. He traveled separately and visited a number of countries, principally France, where he also had a lot of students. Then he showed up in America and said he was coming to my parents’ farm—which was a hobby farm, not a real working farm. Rinpoche stayed there for about five weeks, and people gradually came and invited him to other places. Things unfolded from there, and that is when I became his interpreter, because there wasn’t anybody else. The people who were meant to be translating completely fell through, so I ended up becoming his translator.
HAEDERLE: You had mastered enough Tibetan at that point?
MCLEOD: “Mastered” is a very generous term. Strange things happen when there are thirty people in a room who know absolutely no Tibetan, one person who knows no English, and you’re meant to know both. After a while, you do.
BOYLE: At the end of that five-week period?
MCLEOD: We visited centers in Toronto and Montreal, and then moved out to Vancouver. He stayed a couple of months in Vancouver, where he established a center. He asked me to stay in Vancouver and look after the
lama [Tibetan Buddhist teacher] whom he left there. For the next two years I translated a lot of teachings and helped develop the center. Rinpoche came back in 1974 for a second North American tour, and this time I toured with him everywhere that he went, as his translator. That was about six months or so, I guess.
A few years later, in 1976, Rinpoche announced that he was going to set up a three-year retreat for Westerners, in France. So a group of us in Vancouver started to earn some money in order to do the retreat. Being completely unskilled, I got a teaching assistantship at UBC, to get my M.A. in mathematics, while my wife and I became foster parents. So we had a household full of kids for a year. Other people worked in an iron mine, in the Queen Charlotte Islands, where they earned their money to go to the retreat.
HAEDERLE: Can you say something about what three-year retreats entail?
MCLEOD: A three-year retreat is a form of training in the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions, principally. The time is really three years and three fortnights, because according to the Kalachakra Tantra, that is the time when if you take a certain number of breaths and you are completely in attention for all of those breaths, then you are done. But it’s an intensive form of training, and was revitalized in the nineteenth century by Jamgön Kongtrül the Great. Kalu Rinpoche had been the retreat master in Tibet, and then had set up a three-year retreat in Bhutan when he was asked by the royal family to do that. When he took over the monastery in Sonada, that is the first thing he did.
HAEDERLE: How does one pass a day in a three-year retreat?
MCLEOD: In Kalu Rinpoche’s three-year retreats you were trained in both the Karma Kagyu tradition and the Shangpa Kagyu tradition, the Shangpa Kagyu being a small but very potent line of transmission that goes back to the twelfth century. And that’s what we did in the three-year retreat—we had transmissions of two complete traditions. A typical day went like this: you get up at four, meditate until seven, and meet for morning ritual. Then you have breakfast, meditate from nine to noon, have lunch, then meditate again from then to three-thirty or four o’clock. Later on in the retreat we did a yoga session, but we didn’t do that at the beginning. Then there’s evening ritual, then dinner, which is usually just a light soup or something, then mediation from seven until nine. After that there were several more practices you did until you went to sleep, around ten or so. Then up again at four.
BOYLE: So somewhere during that time you made the transition from doing the prostrations to sitting meditation?
MCLEOD: I’m terrible at sitting meditation. I mean, I persevered at this. It’s what made me extremely sick in the three-year retreat. I have a colon problem; I should never have tried to do normal meditation posture. I got very, very ill. Other people sit easily, but it has never come easily to me. If I’d been in any other tradition I probably would have dropped out of Buddhism, because I just couldn’t sit still.
BOYLE: The theme I want to pursue here is this: you had choices all the way along. You did the three-year retreat, but you could have gone off in a different direction. All of us have done lots of different things that were fun for a while, or involved us for a while, but we ended up going on to something else. What kept you on this path? Were there doubts in your mind? Something kept you going on this.
MCLEOD: Suzuki Roshi said in Crooked Cucumber that he was too stupid to leave. He just stayed. He didn’t realize it was an abusive situation, he just stayed, and something came out of that. For me, there were a few critical points. First, it made sense. There was a system in effect, and a pretty rational presentation of Buddhist teaching, which you could really get your teeth into, and it didn’t involve—at least I didn’t think it involved—believing in something that was problematic. But I do recall people back then saying, “Gee, Ken, you have incredible faith.” I couldn’t relate to their comments at all, because it never felt like faith to me. Now I know what faith feels like, because one of the practices—ngöndro practices, particularly guru yoga—is all about faith. I practiced that, and practiced it quite deeply, and through that I came to know how powerful faith is as a tool for really opening to insight and direct experience. But when people said, “You must have tremendous faith,” it didn’t have that association for me. I wasn’t really clear what they were referring to. The best I can say is, it felt right. We were being exposed to teachings. When Rinpoche said he was going to do a three-year retreat for Westerners, we had heard about all these teachings, but we never expected to actually be able to learn them. So it was like, “Oh, we can really learn everything here? And develop that level of depth of practice?” That sounded like an extraordinary opportunity. So there was never any question. Other people thought it would be a good idea, but then they ran into all kinds of obstacles. As one person famously put it, “Wanting to do this three-year retreat isn’t enough.” Which I thought was very well said. But I didn’t feel like it was any kind of special quality in me, at all.
HAEDERLE: Was Kalu Rinpoche there for most of the time?
MCLEOD: For the three-year retreat? No. He gave all the empowerments before we went into the three-year retreat. He visited the retreat, over the three-year period, two, three times? He left one of his lamas who had done a three-year retreat as our retreat director. So he gave the instruction, and everything like that. When it was over Kalu Rinpoche came to the ceremonies, to bring us out of the three-year retreat. And then we went on to the next one, which I was also part of.
HAEDERLE: Did you have any contact with the outside world during this time?
MCLEOD: Very little. Men and women were housed in separate retreats. But we could send notes back and forth. We never left the compound at all. It was enclosed, and it was sealed. The only people who came in were visiting teachers and our retreat director. Our cook lived inside, and he went back and forth, and occasionally a doctor visited. And that was that.
HAEDERLE: And what happened?
MCLEOD: Nothing. We just practiced all the time, and learned, and studied.
HAEDERLE: And what happened to you?
MCLEOD: Well, I got sick on the first retreat, really quite ill—the colon problem. I didn’t know it was a colon problem, it was just a big, big obstacle. That made following the retreat schedule very difficult. I couldn’t sleep sitting up, which is one of the things that we do in the three-year retreat. Other people didn’t have any problem with that. They just learned to sleep sitting up. Our retreat director, I think, had not laid down to sleep for thirty years.
BOYLE: What advantages is that supposed to confer?
MCLEOD: Lighter, more restful sleep; clearer mind. So many things happened. Probably the most significant was that Rinpoche had scheduled two months for meditation on compassion, called taking and sending, tonglen—Mahayana mind training. Independently I decided to do it in the traditional way, which was to do a proper grounding in loving-kindness and compassion. So I spent the first month doing loving-kindness for two weeks and then compassion. Those were very powerful for me. They made a huge difference. Doing compassion meditation that way is basically like taking a knife to your heart and cutting it open. It’s pretty intense.
I didn’t know I had changed, but I got a report back from my wife: “They’re saying it’s much easier to live with you now, Ken.” I mean, there were various internal problems in those retreats, as you can well imagine. We had seven people trying to sort out how they were going to manage themselves. But that period of time made a big difference, and was one of the reasons I’ve always put a great deal of emphasis with my students on the four immeasurables [loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity].
We did a lot of
yidam practice, which is tough stuff, a lot of elaborate visualization, a lot of mantras, and that made me really sick. One of the things that happens when you are doing long-term retreats is that any energy imbalances that you have in your system come out as illness. And I had a lot. Then we went through the more advanced practices: six yogas of Niguma, six yogas of Naropa, six yogas of Sukhasiddhi. Three complete transmissions, which is unusual. I had a fair number of experiences there, but because of my problems I could never stabilize anything. Other people did, I think, in the retreat. But by the end of the retreat I realized that there was tremendous power in these methods, and I thought that I had only scratched the surface.
At the end of the first three-year retreat it was clear that everybody was going to be sent to a center to teach. The only way that I saw of avoiding that was to do a second three-year retreat, which I did—my wife and I both did. I really didn’t want to be sent to a center, and I was given permission to do a second retreat. Much to my parents’ consternation—but they came around.
BOYLE: So you were not yourself motivated to become a teacher?
MCLEOD: No. I’ve always thought that in Buddhism, and probably in other arenas, one of the qualifications of being a teacher is that you don’t want to teach.
So we did the second three-year retreat, which went extremely smoothly for my wife, and was one of the darkest periods of my life for me. The physical problem got worse, and I went into what I now know to be a state of quite deep depression. It was pretty black for two years or so. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t have any diagnosis at that time. I wouldn’t have a diagnosis until maybe fifteen or twenty years later. It was just really, really hard. When I finished I was very weak physically and emotionally. Rinpoche apparently told my wife that I was so ill that I shouldn’t do any more three-year retreats. He never told me that. So we made our way back to Canada, in 1983.
BOYLE: But again, you’d never considered going off to another life?
MCLEOD: No. I very nearly exited from the second three-year retreat, but that was right at the beginning. There were eleven people in the second retreat rather than seven, and there was much discord. Several of the new people just shouldn’t have been in the retreat—they didn’t have sufficient stability, etc. I was really angry about that. So I considered for a month or so exiting from the retreat, but then I realized that to do so would probably set some kind of precedent that would be really problematic historically. It’s amazing how these things work. I decided to stay for the sake of the tradition. That was my decision, and once I had made that decision I just continued on.
By this point I really wanted to have deep experience. Even though, as I say to my students, I had reached a point in the second three-year retreat where my body said to me, “Ken, you can go and get enlightened if you wish, I’m not coming.” I didn’t know how to relate to that at all. Being a good WASP, I didn’t know how to relate to those kinds of things.
BOYLE: You said you had a number of briefer experiences, which didn’t boost your practice or get integrated into your practice. They were more like appetizers?
MCLEOD: It’s more that they showed what was possible. In other words, I knew that the practices worked, and I knew that I knew how to do them, but my health issues wouldn’t let me do them. That meant that after the three-year retreat I went into a very difficult period where I was extremely prone to depression. I also felt, once Rinpoche had sent me to Los Angeles, that I was now condemned to teaching people practices that they would be able to do and I would never be able to do. So the bitterness I felt about that was challenging, shall we say.
Many years later I came across a poem by Stephen Crane:
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
I could really relate to that!
After that we went back to Canada and had our lives nicely settled there, doing adult education, teaching in community colleges. Then Rinpoche sent me to Los Angeles. My wife didn’t go. That’s when I started teaching.
HAEDERLE: So this is about the mid-’80s, in Los Angeles?
MCLEOD: Yes. I set up a center, working from scratch, but I didn’t ever enjoy it. I made a lot of innovations, got a lot of people upset about stuff. Separated from my wife. Well, to be honest, I got involved with somebody else and then separated from my wife, which I’m not terribly proud about, but that’s how things go. I had resigned myself to this as what the rest of my life was going to be. I was in my late thirties at this point. I was slowly recovering physical strength. I wasn’t depressed all the time, but very subject to it.
HAEDERLE: Had you ever ordained?
MCLEOD: No. I had ordained as a layperson, but I’d never taken monk’s vows. During the retreat we were ordained as laypeople, but I’ve never regarded myself as a monk.
HAEDERLE: So I guess this is a critical question. If your life was in such a bleak place, as a result of this practice, then go back to square one. Practice is supposed to be liberation from suffering. How is it that you found yourself in this puzzle?
MCLEOD: One can conjecture all sorts of things here. I have a much better understanding of my own psychology now than I did then. The retreat experience showed me that the practices worked, the teachings were true. That meant the problem was me, which is not a conclusion I would come to today, but certainly the conclusion I came to then. The other thing is that by this point I was very heavily steeped in the Tibetan tradition. I could only see things from the perspective of the Tibetan tradition, and in terms of that system I didn’t have any choice.
Here is where Los Angeles was a corrupting influence. People would say to me:
“Well, why are you here, Ken?”
“Because Kalu Rinpoche sent me.”
“Well, why did you obey Kalu Rinpoche?”
“Because that’s just what you do in the Tibetan tradition, you do what your guru says.”
“So you chose to come here.”
“No I didn’t, Kalu Rinpoche sent me.”
That was the way the logic worked for me. It took six or eight months at least, with people who had become trusted advisors pushing, before I finally made the cognitive leap: I had chosen to accept this as a system.
That’s a very powerful shift, because now everything comes into question. And more and more stuff came into question as that rattled around inside me. I had accepted the Tibetan system of doing things. There were a lot of things that I had never questioned, because they’re never questioned in the Tibetan tradition.
Even so, I still did things my own way, and I found a significant tension, a consistent tension between what Kalu Rinpoche expected me to do in L.A. and what I felt was appropriate. That tension was summarized when I was translating for Kalu Rinpoche when he was teaching a retreat in Southern California, at Big Bear Lake. What Rinpoche said was this, which was entertaining to everybody except little me:
When Ken came to Los Angeles he was very skillful. He taught people to meditate on their breath, and they felt good about doing that. So lots of people became interested in meditation and he built up the center and now we have this retreat with everybody here. This is good, he was very skillful. Well, maybe he was skillful. Maybe he was just afraid to tell the truth. I’m not afraid to tell the truth.
Then he went on about the hell realms, and karma and stuff. Everybody was laughing uproariously while I was translating. That was basically Rinpoche’s perspective on it. He didn’t like it. I went to see Rinpoche in 1988 because I realized this was probably the last time I would see him. He was getting progressively weaker—he was eighty-nine at this point. So I went to see him with the very specific purpose of thanking him for everything that I had received, but also to tell him what I was going to do. So rather than stumble through this with my soft voice, which Rinpoche at that point had great difficulty hearing, I had his secretary translate for me. I explained that virtually everything I knew about the Dharma I had learned from him, and that I had received all of these transmissions and empowerments and I thanked him for that, and that I’d done a lot of work helping to develop the centers in Vancouver and L.A. and various other places. Then I said that in the future I wasn’t going to do any more work on the centers, because it wasn’t something I was particularly good at. But what I would do was take a phrase that Rinpoche used all the time, that the purpose of the Dharma is to benefit the mind. I said, “This you have said many times, I have taken this to heart, and I will undertake for the rest of my life to teach the Dharma to help people’s minds.”
Of course, Rinpoche turned around and had a meeting with all of my students and talked with them for an hour and a half about why centers were important. So obviously he wasn’t happy about it at all. But I didn’t give him much room for argument. I wanted to make it clear, since this was our last meeting, that while I was grateful, this was the direction in which I was going to go. I felt very clean about that, and that was important.
But earlier, Rinpoche had asked all of his senior students, particularly those who knew Tibetan, to come to India to start on a translation project, so I participated in that. I closed the center at that point, because with me away there was no income, and went to India. We translated about eight hours a day, but the rest of the time was our own. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to do when I went back to Los Angeles. That is when the idea of becoming a meditation consultant arose. One of the things that I had found problematic was that people would study, or practice meditation, and they would wrestle with a problem for three to six months and get all bent out of shape, when it could have been taken care of in a three-minute conversation. I wanted to have a format in which I was getting actual information about people’s practice. So I became a meditation consultant. Well, I fumbled around with that when I came back, but after about two years I had a private practice. I had enough clients that I could rent an office. That became the basis of Unfettered Mind. And I never looked back.
So for a while I was doing both of those things, carrying on the center, even though it was only on paper now, and doing stuff for Unfettered Mind. I didn’t start Unfettered Mind until after Rinpoche died, in 1989. But after a couple of years, about 1992, I let go of all formal connection with Tibetan traditions, completely. But I also had no position in any institution.
BOYLE: So, you were in L.A., you were depressed sometimes and had the remnants of physical weakness and illness. Had you changed your position for sitting and doing meditation?
MCLEOD: Not for a very long time. I couldn’t sit for more than a half hour at a time, and I avoided ceremonies like the plague, because they just made me sick. I tried to do a Zen sesshin, and I got very sick after three days. It wasn’t until the mid-’90s that I finally gave up and started sitting in a chair.
BOYLE: Did you use other activities as meditation, like taking walks?
MCLEOD: No, depression immobilizes you, so you do very little. After a year or so I realized that one of the people who started studying with me in Los Angeles knew a hell of a lot more than he was letting on, and he started to teach me tai chi. Very gradually, that had a beneficial effect. I worked a little bit with Iyengar yoga with a good teacher, but it wasn’t a good form of discipline for me. She pushed me straight into the trauma in my system, and it was like stepping into a black hole of pure fear. I said, “No, I don’t think so.” I mean, that was not very pleasant.
Tai chi was more congruent with me. My relationship with this person moved from me being the teacher and him being the student to having a student-teacher relationship that went both ways. And we discovered that both of us were stuck in our spiritual practices, and we discovered that each of us had the keys to unlock the other. So over a twelve-year period, we met almost weekly, exchanging our technologies. His background was in Gurdjieff and martial arts, and mine was in Tibetan Buddhism. That was a very rich relationship, and he continues to be a good friend even though he has moved away. A lot of the stuff in
Wake up to Your Life has come out of that interaction, and that way of approaching things. So that was a gem that happened in L.A., the last kind of thing you’d expect. But it was very important.
Haederle: You said it took seventeen years before you were able to identify your depression for what it was?
McLeod: It became clear that during the early years in Vancouver, 1973–74, I had the same problem. I didn’t do anything for a year except read science fiction. And do ngöndro. That was it, because I was depressed. In the early ’90s a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at UC Irvine, a guy called Roger Walsh, went out of his way to help me and create some opportunities. Very kind of him. He made an offhand comment to me, saying, “Ken, have you ever considered depression?” I just dismissed it. But in 1997 things were getting intense. I knew of a therapist who specialized in depression, so I went to see him for EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing] work, and it was completely ineffective. The first session I had with him, he said, “If this doesn’t produce anything within five or six sessions then it is very unlikely to,” and by the fifth or sixth session it was clearly not working. But he spent an extra twenty minutes with me, and I recall that kindness.
When things continued to deteriorate I went back to see him, and worked with him for several years. He was never very effective with the depression, but together with the work that I was doing in tai chi and a number of other things, there was gradual improvement. Oh yes—the reason I went to see him was that I called Roger and said, “I want to talk with you about depression.” He said, “I’m so glad you called, Ken. I’ve been waiting five years to have this conversation.” We had a forty-five minute diagnostic conversation, and he said, “You’ve got double depression: dysthymia and clinical depression.” That’s when I started working with this therapist. By this time I was long separated from my second wife. I was teaching and doing various things, but I was often just crawling during the day. One of the problems here is that the dynamics of depression and the dynamics of meditation are similar. If you practice meditation it’s very easy to become depressed, if you’re subject to it. That’s something I learned. There’s a great deal of inertia in me, which in all honesty I can really only attribute to the depression. I’m not one of those people who goes out and explores things and tries to fix them. The depression doesn’t move me in that direction.
Eventually the therapist that I was working with reached out to an extremely good practitioner of EMDR who had basically retired, and twisted his arm for me. That turned out to be a very fruitful thing. I’m not immobilized the way I used to be, at all. I’ve learned slowly, over time, that a very large amount of it was diet-related. That’s why I don’t eat high-fiber food, because it activates the colon the wrong way.
There’s a strong relation between the colon and depression—it’s just like that. If I get the wrong foods, I go down really fast. I’ve stopped being polite. Now I say, “No, it just isn’t good for me.” The first time I was ever able to actually do any kind of retreat, since the three-year retreats, was in 2003 when I did a retreat at Tara Mandala. For that I had complete control over what I did. I could lie down, sit, anything I wanted. That turned out to be a very deep retreat. It made a lot of difference, in a lot of different ways. It simplified a whole bunch of stuff. I was very happy about it. I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
In 2006 I started a series of retreats at the Mandala Center in Des Moines, New Mexico. The first was a dzogchen retreat, a three-week retreat. I’d never taught a retreat that long. Then the next year I taught a ten-day retreat on illusory body, because I felt an obligation to pass on some of the stuff that I’d received. I taught a lot of the stuff that I’d never touched, advanced Vajrayana, illusory body, illusory form. That went very well, since it’s intimately connected with compassion. The second year I decided that I would teach clear light and dream, because that would complete the transmission of those practices and I felt an obligation to do that. It was an excruciatingly painful teaching experience for me, partly because the diet wasn’t good, so I was subject to depression, and partly because it took me right back to the three-year retreat and all the pain I had experienced there. It was pretty horrible, but I got through it. My students were actually quite upset to see how much difficulty I was having. That was hard for them.
Then last year, 2008, I did two ten-day retreats, the first one on
mahamudra and the second on dzogchen. In between, something shifted in me, which has created a huge number of problems. But I found a couple of other people who shared the problems, which makes me feel better, and I can trace it to the exact thing that started it. It’s a line in a book by a person who was a relatively obscure professor of philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics, a guy called John Gray. He had written a number of books, but one called
Straw Dogs had come out in Britain in around 2000. I was reading it at that time, in 2008. Now I’m on my third time through it. It is an extraordinary attack on liberal humanism. It’s a very effective attack, quite deep. It has this line in it: “Philosophers claim that they are seeking truth, when actually they are seeking peace.” I’d read the line before, but something shifted. It was my light on the road to Damascus.
BOYLE: This was only last year?
MCLEOD: Last year. At that point I now saw Buddhism as any other religion, riddled with assumptions and beliefs. It was just like, Oh, it’s full of bullshit like everything else. Oh, shit, what can I do now? There was a real problem. I almost stopped teaching completely. I got through the second retreat, I’m not sure quite how, because students were there to learn something.
But I came back. I mean, my mind was very clear most of the time. Very still, very quiet. Something very deep physically had let go, so there was a whole level of discomfort that wasn’t there anymore. I’d had to stop drinking alcohol, because my body couldn’t tolerate it, but I found that I could have a sip of wine now and then, which I like. Now I can drink a glass of wine with a meal and have no ill effects. So there was change in the physical, the emotional, the spiritual levels, right across the board. Meditation has become much easier; in fact, I don’t even worry about it now. I mean, I practice every day, although some days my mind is quieter than others.
Out of this experience came the philosophy, very deeply held: there is no enemy. That’s taken absolutely. I had no idea what I was doing. My students, with whom I talked about this, laughed. They said, “What’s the big deal, Ken? This is what you’ve always taught us.” “I did?” I finally got it right at one of my teacher-student trainings. One of my senior students said, “I don’t see what the big deal is, Ken. Here you’ve just said, ‘We cannot know what this experience we call life is, yet we have to navigate it.’ I don’t see how that’s different from the two truths: emptiness and apparent reality.” When he said that I laughed, and said, “You’re right.” But it was now totally different as an internal experience. All this business about timeless awareness I now respond to by saying, “Just because you can experience timeless awareness doesn’t mean there is a timeless awareness.”
BOYLE: I felt when I read the lines in An Arrow to the Heart, which was written before your road to Damascus experience, that they opened some things up for me.
MCLEOD: That is exactly what it was intended to do.
BOYLE: But now you are telling me that you hadn’t actually experienced some of it yet.
MCLEOD: No, I mean I had come to some things, but what happened last year was on a whole different level.
BOYLE: You managed to write that whole book feeling depressed and in a much more limited state?
MCLEOD: Well, I could communicate it to people, but I didn’t experience it, which has a lot to do with the depression and being shut down. It was there in me, I just didn’t have any connection with it. Which is interesting.
HAEDERLE: Something about that line that you quoted from the philosopher John Gray. This idea of seeing Buddhism as any other religion sounds as though it somehow took out the foundations beneath a kind of faith structure.
MCLEOD: No, I’d say more of a belief structure. John 16:32: “Know ye the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” This is complete bullshit. I realized—and you get this all in Tibetan Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism more than Theravadan—if you know the truth, then you will be free. It’s all this “wisdom is the path,” and it’s completely wrong, it’s highly problematic. I realized that I had operated under the assumption that if I could know how things were, then I would be free of suffering. It’s not true.
If one makes a distinction between factual reality and practical reality, Buddhism initially was practical reality. Somewhere along the way I knew this, because my tag line for Unfettered Mind is “Pragmatic Buddhism.” Something in me sensed that a long time ago. There is a quote from Miyamoto Musashi, which I adapted because he was talking about martial arts, but it is absolutely my attitude toward Buddhism, to the effect that, “Many people feel when studying martial arts (or Buddhism) that what you learn will not be useful in the world. The true way of the Buddha is that what you learn gives you the skills that are useful in the world, and should be taught and practiced in a way that can be used in any situation.” So it is a completely pragmatic approach, and I just realized, This is what I do.
But, yes, something shifted in me, so I didn’t know where the walls were. I had no reference. One of my students in Santa Fe is a very smart business consultant. I was talking with her and described what had happened, and I said, half-joking, “I’ve got a marketing problem now.” She looked at me and said, “You’ve got a big marketing problem.” She got it immediately. So what are you going to do with it?
HAEDERLE: Do you think that in your body you were holding a kind of cognitive dissonance around all of this?
MCLEOD: I wouldn’t say I’m free of it yet. A piece has fallen away. I wouldn’t say all of it has. Not even close. I think it’s much deeper than cognitive dissonance. Something, obviously. But all of this stuff is encoded in the body, and many approaches to Buddhism don’t recognize that, or try to override the body, or whatever. I tell people, “You’ve got to go through the body.” Then I continually drive them back to their body experience. It’s quite different from the way they do it in the vipassana tradition. I know many people who practice the vipassana tradition, and they’re not in touch with what’s going on in their body. They really aren’t. They’ve got a whole different schema, and it’s just as problematic.
I was talking to the head of a very large company, and he said, “Ken, what’s life like for you these days?” “Well, imagine that you’re walking over the Grand Canyon.” He said, “Walking into the Grand Canyon?” “No, over the Grand Canyon.” Now, it’s not the Wile E. Coyote thing, where if you look down you start to fall. You’re not sure what’s up, what’s down, what’s forward, what’s back. That’s what life is for me today.
It’s settled down a bit. But I had a nice talk with John Tarrant, and he seemed to relate to it very straightforwardly. Yesterday I got in touch with Stephen Batchelor, whom I’ve known for some time. He has, through his own route, come to very similar conclusions. There is a small group of us.
BOYLE: But you exist. It’s amazing to me.
MCLEOD: It’s very interesting, because Stephen approaches it differently from the way I do. From his point of view, this is what Buddha was really talking about, and everything else is an accretion. So when he talks to other people, they look at him and say, “You know, you’re not really Buddhist,” and his internal response is, Well, actually, I feel like I’m really following the Buddha’s path more closely, while you’re stuck in some beliefs. My point of view is, Well, I don’t know, maybe this is what Buddha was doing. Stephen has the scholastic knowledge, which he has researched very deeply. But I know I don’t have the beliefs that many other people do—in fact, 90 percent of what they are talking about is bullshit. So I don’t belong there.
HAEDERLE: I was thinking about your interaction with your student in Santa Fe. You talk openly about this with your students?
MCLEOD: Not with all of them, but with students who are closer to me, senior students. It’s been upsetting for them. They are, like, I’ve really pulled the rug out from under their feet. One of them has been very good after a year of being absolutely furious and upset with me. I just kept hammering, hammering her, on her attachment to an ideal. When she finally started to let go, she said, “Oh.” Any form of idealism is problematic. So that was a big piece of her practice. I just kept pulling the rug out until she finally said, “Okay, I’m tired of falling down. No more ideals.”
Other students have had problems as well. I’ve always been pretty transparent, which is one of the things that has distinguished me from a lot of teachers. I had an interesting experience once during teacher training. I had everybody, for this particular session, bring a mask, a physical mask, because I wanted them to explore teaching with a mask and teaching without a mask. I had them see what it was like to interact with someone who was wearing a mask, and to be wearing a mask yourself, and all the different combinations. Then, as two of these people were interacting, the person who was in the teacher role and didn’t have his mask on was just fumbling. He couldn’t get it. I said, “Put your mask on.” He immediately began to teach absolutely correctly. So masks are not bad or good, they’re just different ways of relating to this role. I did not learn any of that from the Tibetan tradition. I wasn’t taught it, I learned it. There are pros and cons to wearing a mask. In the Zen tradition you always teach behind the mask. In most of the formal traditions you are mostly teaching behind the mask. It’s effective; it’s just different. But generally I’m not wearing a mask when I teach, and that is one of the things that distinguishes me from a lot of teachers.
