Dakini Power by Michaela Haas

Author:Michaela Haas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

A SUPER BIRTHDAY PRESENT: A SON

Elizabeth began teaching English at a school in Kathmandu, but soon she was expecting a child. Heavily pregnant, Elizabeth traveled to Thailand with Kongtrul Rinpoche and her mother, in order to give birth at an upscale hospital in Bangkok. As if to show how strong-willed his wife can be, Kongtrul Rinpoche animatedly tells the story how, on the spur of the moment, Elizabeth decided to give birth on Kongtrul Rinpoche’s twenty-third birthday, October 23, 1988. Wouldn’t that make a super birthday present? Kongtrul Rinpoche remembers thinking, “This was pretty much impossible.” Indeed the baby wouldn’t come. After more than five hours of off and on labor, the doctor on duty impatiently left to go home. Fifteen minutes before midnight, Elizabeth asked what time it was. Kongtrul Rinpoche told her, and he remembers vividly, “She got really mad! She got up and walked around the room, and within ten minutes the baby came out!” It just seemed “a good present,” she now says a little shyly, “and he seemed to appreciate it.”

They named their son Jampal Norbu, “the Precious Soft-Voiced One.” The first part is also the Tibetan name of the Buddha of Wisdom, Manjushri. When Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche blessed the baby, he predicted that Jampal would be Kongtrul Rinpoche’s successor and lineage holder. Jampal, now twenty-three years old, is an unassuming, lanky gentleman with a perplexing sense of humor. He currently studies with his father at Kongtrul Rinpoche’s family seat in the Tibetan settlement of Bir, North India, preparing for his future role as the dharma heir. Instead of handing him over to a monastery for training, as parents of tulkus usually do, Kongtrul Rinpoche kept him close.

Kongtrul Rinpoche acknowledges that he came to the West due to Elizabeth. With Jampal still a baby, they got on a plane to Boulder, Colorado. Kongtrul Rinpoche was offered the World Wisdom Chair at Naropa, the Buddhist university founded by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Elizabeth went on a rigid schedule. During the day she would pursue her master’s degree at Naropa, studying Buddhism with her husband who was slowly building a small but devoted community of Western students. Often getting up at three in the morning, while Jampal was still asleep, she would start doing her prostrations to complete the hundred thousand prostrations, refuge and bodhichitta prayers, cleansing, offering, and guru yogac practices that Kongtrul Rinpoche’s tradition prescribes as preliminaries.

But then, almost overnight, Kongtrul Rinpoche decided to move to Crestone. With a lama-husband, there doesn’t always seem to be a satisfying answer to every why. So Elizabeth packed up and went from a hectic city and university life to a godforsaken one-horse town. Sure enough, this was only the first step toward extreme seclusion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.