Geshe Tamdrin Rabten — reluctant abbot
The following account is from preliminary drafts of The Novice.
Geshe Tamdrin Rabten was a leading scholar at 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 nickname Fat Rabten to celebrate his change of fortune. He was one of the leading debaters of his graduating year, and was regarded 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. His classes were transcribed and edited into some of the earliest authentic books in English on Tibetan Buddhism.
Geshe taught in a traditional, structured and systematic way without pretense; he loved the basic material. However, he resisted repeated requests to give high-level tantric initiations and earned a reputation as 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 Geshe 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 vocabulary and imagery 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 etudes 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. Geshe 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. Alan Wallace and Stephen Batchelor, the two leading teachers and interpreters, left for good.
Like many Westerners ordained in these early years, most Tharpa Choeling monks eventually returned to conventional lives.
Simpler days: Gen Rabten in retreat
(photo courtesy of Brian Beresford)
Geshe Rabten with some of his Western monks en route to the Tharpa Choeling temple, circa 1979
Among his former students, Stephen Batchelor became an agnostic writer, whose first best-seller was the contentious Buddhism Without Beliefs. Alan Wallace became an academic and leading upholder of Tibetan orthodoxy. A student associated more with our early days, Georges Dreyfus, impressed everyone by becoming the first Western Lharampa Geshe, only to give up his robes and take a job at Williams University. I decided to leave Tibetan Buddhism behind and let the teachings sink in – or out, if they had no practical use; my interest was in everyday life.
I reintegrated in Montreal, learning typography and web design, and writing what would become The Novice. As for my intense past, I kept my head down and bided my time, waiting for the day I’d teach again.
Of those of us who had gathered around and subsequently left Geshe Rabten, the great exception was the Austrian monk Helmut Gassner. He stood loyally by Geshe 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 Dorje Shugden scandal with his courageously heart-rending but ultimately unpropitious speech to the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation in 1999.
Geshe died in 1986. The centre was renamed Rabten Choeling and Geshe’s ward Gonsar Tulku took over as abbot. The monastery soon welcomed Tenzin Rabgye Rinpoche as Geshe Rabten’s reincarnation. The center has since experienced somewhat of a renaissance and is now home to a new generation of Tibetan and Western monks pursuing the traditional course of Buddhist studies, Gelugpa style. Obliged like all other Gelugpa institutions to align or break with Dorje Shugden, however, it now operates without the auspices of the Dalai Lama.
For more about Tharpa Choeling, Geshe Rabten and the heady days of Tibetan Buddhism's first forays to the West, read Schettini’s The Novice: Why I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit and What I Learned.
