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GESHÉ RABTENThe following account is extracted from preliminary drafts of The Novice. Geshé Tamdrin Rabten was one of the finest scholars to come out of Sera monastery in the final years of old Tibet. He left home as a teenager against his father’s wishes, trekked across half the country to get to Lhasa and lived as a malnourished monk for years until diligence brought him students, food aplenty and the memorable nickname of Fat Rabten. He was the leading debater of his graduating year, renowned also as a great teacher. After fleeing Chinese-occupied Tibet, into India, he settled down to a life of private meditation in the mountains above Dharamsala. His retreat was interrupted by a request from the Dalai Lama to teach the growing number of Westerners who were streaming into Dharamsala. These classes were transcribed and edited into some of the first authoritative English-language books on Tibetan Buddhism. Geshé taught in the most traditional, structured and systematic way with no trace of personal pretension. He resisted repeated requests to give high-level tantric initiations and gained a reputation for being a pragmatist. He consulted the Mo oracle only reluctantly, and generally disappointed those who came to him in search of fortune telling or magical powers (siddi). Those who heard him teach, however, were impressed by the clarity of his presentation. In 1975 the Dalai Lama asked Geshé Rabten to set up a school in Switzerland with the aim of turning out western teachers. Four of his students from India, Stephen Batchelor, Brian Grabia, Arnold Possick and Alan Wallace, spearheaded a small group near Rikon, where I joined them. We were intensely interested in becoming effective interpreters of Buddhism, and also combed Western literature in search of a vocabulary and symbolism that would ring true with our contemporaries. The following year a permanent center was set up above Vevey in Canton Vaud. It was named Tharpa Choeling, Centre d’Hautes Études Tibetaines, and was supported by a group of philanthropist-Buddhists from Geneva, headed by Anne Ansermet. The center grew steadily until 1980, when it experienced a sudden decline. Geshé was skeptical of our interest in Western science, art and epistemology and tried to reign in our eclecticism. To improve my Tibetan, I went to live among his Tibetan disciples in Sera monastery, now replanted in South India, and sent back frequent missives describing the medieval and all too human features of life in a Tibetan monastery. These letters fell like grenades among my restless peers, extinguishing the sparkling light in many an eye and stripping Tibetans of their allure. Tharpa Choeling’s foremost students abandoned monkhood for more conventional western lives. Those who remained – Geshé's most devoted disciples – showed little interest in teaching. Among his former students, Stephen Batchelor went on to write Buddhism Without Beliefs. Alan Wallace studied physics and became an academic interpreter of Buddhism through the eyes of science. An old student, Georges Dreyfus, impressed everyone by becoming a Lharampa Geshé, only to give up his robes and take a job at Williams University. Brian Grabia became a psychotherapist and counselor. I decided to live a purely conventional life and let the teachings sink in – or out, if they had no practical use. In Montreal I studied Western culture, taught myself to use a computer, cultivated visual and verbal communications skills and began to write what would become The Novice. As for my intense past, I kept my head down and bided my time, knowing that one day I’d teach again. Of those of us who had gathered around and subsequently left Geshé Rabten, the outstanding exception was Helmut Gassner. He stood loyally by Geshé and retains his robes to this day. He spends his time between the center in Switzerland and Trijang Labrang in Feldkirch, Austria. Helmut is notable for wading into the shocking Dorjé Shugden scandal with his courageous speech to the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation in 1999. Geshé died in 1986. The centre was renamed Rabten Choeling and Geshé’s ward Gonsar Tulku took over as abbot. The monastery soon welcomed Tenzin Rabgye Rinpoché as Geshé Rabten’s reincarnation. Since then the center has experienced a renaissance and is now home to a new generation of Tibetan and Western monks pursuing the traditional course of Buddhist studies, Gelukpa style.
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