The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi by 9780834840713

Author:9780834840713
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

11

The Tulkus

BACK IN DELHI, picking up the threads of her former life, Freda’s thoughts were never far from the refugees, her powerful encounter with the Karmapa, and the impact that Tibetan Buddhism had on her. “My old work, the editorial chair and much besides, draws me again, but my heart and mind are still with the Tibetans,” she said. At one point during this stage of her life she had an inexplicable insight. Freda “saw” that Tibetan Buddhism would not only travel to the West but would take root there. And the ones who would bring it about would be the tulkus, Tibet’s recognized reincarnated high lamas and spiritual masters, who held the essence of the teachings. Nobody else at this time shared her vision. On the face of it, it was a highly unlikely, even preposterous notion.

Throughout its 2,500-year history Buddhism had spread widely throughout Asia, taking on the hue of the culture it had landed in, but it had never crossed the great divide between East and West. In the early 1960s, Buddhism was still virtually unknown in the West, outside of a very small handful of scholars. There were no books, no teachers, and meditation was little known. The only Buddhist organization in Britain, for example, was the Buddhist Society in London, founded in 1924 by the judge Christmas Humphreys, which confined itself to Zen and the Theravada Schools of southern Asia. Virtually nothing was known about Tibetan Buddhism (called “lamaism”), and what was known was not liked. In the eyes of the intellectual Buddhist scholars, Tibetan Buddhism was regarded as degenerate—shrouded in the magic and mystery fostered by those shamans of the Bon religion that existed in Tibet before Buddhism took root. There was too much ritual, too much Tantra, too much mumbo jumbo. Word had got out from intrepid travelers who had penetrated the secret Land of Snows that lamas could “fly,” could transform themselves into other beings, perform bilocation, leave handprints in rocks, dry wet sheets in the freezing cold by raising their body temperature at will, and “die” at will, sometimes leaving nothing behind but their robes. It was a far cry from the aesthetic, respectable, chaste lines of Zen.

Tibetan Buddhism would certainly never catch on.

There was also the matter of reincarnation itself, which in the predominantly Christian West was still regarded as heretical. People had been burned at the stake and been killed en masse (such as the Cathars) for believing such anathema. In the 1960s and 1970s reincarnation was still a taboo subject. The Tibetans, however, not only completely accepted reincarnation as a given fact of life, they went farther than any other Buddhist country by devising a system to find specific rebirths of accomplished spiritual masters who had forsaken higher states of consciousness after death in order to be reborn in an earthly body solely to continue to teach others how to reach the same exalted state they had achieved. The voluntary return to this vale of tears was seen as the highest mark of altruism, brave and noble beyond measure.

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