ZOPA RINPOCHÉ

The following account is extracted from preliminary drafts of Schettini's memoir, The Novice.

The young lama giggled briefly, lowered his head so far that his chin almost touched his chest and mumbled some opening prayers. Then, without acknowledging his audience, he shifted his gaze directly from his lap to the empty space above our heads and began to speak.
    “Before, so far what we have done, that is, actually I will describe another time, it is however totally all this various things, these different things … all this purification … however purification is a method to pacify mental and physical suffering … each of these the different form of practices, have so much different explanation … so, I will describe another time.”
    You could have heard a pin drop.
    I didn’t need to look around to know that most people were hanging on his every word. The Tibetan tradition greatly encourages the practice of Guru devotion – seeing the teacher’s every word and action as enlightened, notwithstanding his actual state of awareness which, of course, nobody knows. I tried to develop this attitude, but never quite believed that I believed it. What’s the difference, anyway, between actually believing something and just wanting to? It all seems so convenient.
    At that time, though, I was full of the joy of life, happy to have survived both hepatitis and drug abuse in Pakistan’s Swat valley, and determined to spend the remainder of my life on something useful. Well perhaps I couldn’t believe, but I could suspend judgment. After all, what did I know? I watched the young man trying so hard. He’d assured us that he was completely unqualified to teach and was only there because his own teacher, Lama Yeshé, had insisted.
    He was in his twenties but had the complexion of a newborn. His smooth skin was stretched almost to transparency over stick-thin arms. His hands lay mostly still in his lap, rising with a flutter to illustrate his words, then falling again like sparrows. In spite of the constant struggle with words he remained ineffably cheerful and intent. The topic was impermanence – the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its time. He was making his way through the formal points of the traditional teaching when he paused in mid-sentence and cocked his head to one side.
    Lama Yeshé, the young rinpoché's teacher and guardian, had been explaining the traditional teaching by stages of Tibetan Buddhism to a group of young hippies and had reached the topic of impermanence. The class had ended for the day and one girl returned to her house, which Zopa Rinpoché described in detail – a hut with a long ridge beam over two A-frame supports. He started giggling. He speculated about her contemplating the teaching she’d just received when an explosive laugh erupted from his chest. “And then, and then…” he slapped his side, “the beam broke. Broke in two. And the roof fell.” He wheezed with laughter as he described how the house had collapsed, smashing her skull and killing her instantly. He reiterated the punchline several times with the same slapstick reaction.
    A hush fell. The audience fidgeted nervously, looked perturbed and chewed lips. The fact that no one joined in his laughter seemed to tickle the young lama even more. My first thought was that Tibetans didn’t seem to take death quite as seriously as we did, given their belief in reincarnation. There was certainly a lesson in it for us. I for one would have been happy to lose my fear of death and to take the subject as lightly as him, but it was hard not to be disturbed by his cavalier attitude. It certainly was a teaching I never forgot.

ZOPA RINPOCHÉ
the Lawdo Lama,
c 1975