Source: Page 145 of White Noise Keywords: "buy," "musical," "midair"

From: "Geir" <geirsmith@aol.com> Subject: Re: what makes a person great Date: 9 Jun 2006 Newsgroups: alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan

"THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN -- THE SANGYE ERA Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. --Arnold Bennett Jay Allen was spending lots of time across the street in the woods, clearing land with some of the monks that autumn of 1990, when Jetsunma started looking at him differently. Suddenly, it seemed, she had come out of hibernation. She was thinner, happier, and stronger--people said that at Bally's Holiday Spa she was pushing more weight than any of her monks. She was even working on the land, pouring concrete and hauling tree stumps. And she seemed to be noticing Jay. She was asking him questions and giving him a hard time about his clothes. He was twenty-six but still had a sloppy teenage way about him. Sometimes he went a few days without shaving. Sometimes his T-shirts looked a little worn out and wrinkled. His straight brown hair got stringy and stuck to his forehead. But he wasn't the sort of guy who cared. Mainly, he was into practice--meditating, praying, and finishing Ngondro. And in 1987 he'd sold his motorcycle to buy himself some time to do it. He had once sat down on a cushion in the prayer room and announced, "I'm not leaving this room until I achieve enlightenment." Besides Tibetan Buddhism and his devotion to Jetsunma, his great love in life was watching football on TV and going to Washington Redskins games with his dad. The two of them--Don and Jay Allen--had been students of Jetsunma since the early Kensington days. It was she who had told Jay that he didn't need to go to college. Ever since the Poolesville property had been purchased in 1985, the Allens had lived in a small white guest cottage on the temple grounds. Don was an administrator at the U.S. Postal Service, and Jay was working for a construction company started by one of the monks, but more than anything he liked working on the temple, building altars and stupas. He'd decided against becoming a monk in 1988 after Jetsunma told him he'd been one in so many previous lifetimes it was unnecessary this time around. Anyway, he wanted to get married someday and have a family--but so far no serious girlfriends had turned up. It was hard to connect with somebody who didn't get Poolesville, and had no exposure to Dharma or Jetsunma. So the world in which Jay had become an adult was a rather limited place. But it was also a sweet place, and an awfully kind place. And increasingly, since Michael Burroughs had departed, it had become the kind of place where anything could happen. Jay fell very hard and very fast once Jetsunma cranked up the heat. He was a boyish twenty-six. She was a seasoned forty-one--and feeling adventurous and liberated from her unfortunate marriage. She swooped in with all the charisma and intensity he could bear. By the time Yantang Tulku had left, a month later, Jay was hers and she was his. It was a blessing, a fabulous mystical blessing. His ship had come in. In every moment with her, every touch of her skin, every kiss ... there were blessings and more blessings, twenty-four hours a day of blessings. Before he knew it she had given him a new name, to indicate his new blessed status: Sangye Dorje. And for a man who seemed in a rush to be enlightened, this was thought to be the quickest path: consort to the lama. *** Nobody in Poolesville really knew what was happening, except maybe Alana or Ariana or Atara, Jetsunma's team of attendants. Just as some of the aspects of her relationship with Teri Milwee were never discussed openly with the sangha, the beginning of Jetsunma's romance with Jay was kept quiet. And so it seemed to some that one day Jetsunma was married and the next Michael had trouble with Correct View and was gone. It seemed that one day Teri and Jetsunma were best friends, and suddenly they weren't. It was the dawning of a new age in Poolesville. Jetsunma had a new body, a new boyfriend, and an entirely new feeling about her. She had been on a buying spree for new clothes. The amount she had been making--$24,000 net a year--had been combined with Michael's old salary of $12,000 and gave her personal spending ability a big of a boost. She was gravitating away from the confining color of burgundy and heavy fabrics to light floral prints and short, frilly dresses. There were wisecracks at the time--the sorts of cracks she loved--about how eventually she was going to wind up with Richard Gere, a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. One night at a sangha party, wearing a particularly low-cut dress, she said, "Yeah, when Richard Gere finally comes here, I'm going to wear one of these." The students felt liberated, too, free from the tyrannical presence of Michael and the tense environment that they'd come to blame on him. In the Sangye era the mood was happier, younger, more positive, and more energetic. Sangye was sweet and gentle--and said to be very pure. Eventually Jetsunma would tell them that Sangye's merit alone had saved the center from collapse. This revelation that merit could be shared had a flip side: The merit or lack of merit of one member of the sangha could negatively affect the whole. It was a one-bad-apple kind of theory, which was why Michael, it was explained thoughtfully, was such a dangerous presence, a man of such demonically low merit that the entire group had been sinking with him. Once word got around that Jetsunma and Sangye wanted to marry, but Michael was still refusing to grant her a divorce, the level of rancor toward him increased. "We wanted to get married," Sangye said, "And we were going to get married, but Michael was not willing to budge ... It was a fight. And it was ugly. He really turned ugly after he left. But then, again, part of the reason he left was because he was already ugly." Nobody questioned why all the photographs of Michael--and, at the same time, photos of Jetsunma from her heavier days--had been removed from the temple walls. The mood in Poolesville continued toward a kind of breathy exhilaration during these months, aided, oddly enough, by the Persian Gulf War. Jetsunma explained that she had seen this conflict brewing for six or seven years--in fact, the big world peace vigil that she had held in 1984 had largely been meant to "lessen the negativity in the Middle East." The effects of that vigil were now being realized, she said, and preventing the war from escalating into mass destruction and bloodshed. But there was more praying to do. It had been a long time since they'd come together and prayed around the clock, perhaps not since Alana's brain tumor. The gulf War reminded the old-timers of the Kensington days: the sense of purpose, the light-headedness that comes from intensive prayer. Since they had become Tibetan Buddhists, it was as though their main focus had been to build. Everything had been about doing things correctly--not about saving the world. "We were like the military," said one nun. "We had been training for this for years--and were really excited to use what we'd learned. We were ready to roll." Things seemed cozy in the sangha in those days. Their lama was happily occupied with a new love. Walking outside the main temple building to their prayer shifts, students would sometimes turn to look in the windows of Jetsunma's living room and see her with Sangye, snuggling in front of the television and laughing. Even Sherab thought they made a perfect couple and started calling them Mr. and Mrs. Cuddles. Atira still called out for Michael in the middle of the night, but she was turning three and growing attached to Sangye. A few people thought it was a little too soon, but she had already started calling him Daddy. There was no official wedding, but the ordained hosted a party for Jetsunma and Sangye--a Consort Engagement Party it was called--at Ani Estates, where a group of nuns lived. Sangye arrived in an outfit that Jetsunma had picked out for him, new black pants and a black-and-red shirt. His hair was styled and gelled. He'd even shaved. The couple exchanged rings. The ordained had been told by Alana that it was a lifelong dream of Jetsunma to go to Hawaii--and that it would be extremely auspicious for the monastic community to send their lama and her new consort there. So the monks and nuns raised the money among them and presented Jetsunma and Sangye with an engagement gift: a Hawaiian honeymoon, all expenses paid. *** It wasn't unusual for Jetsunma to pay special attention to the pregnant women in her sangha and to fuss over new babies. She was "motherly," as she would say. And she seemed genuinely to love children. She always came to the hospital to see the new babies and bless them. She had named nearly all the children born to her students. It is an Eastern tradition, and thought to be auspicious and smart--bringing good luck to the child--to have a lama bless the baby and give it a name. Outside Penor Rinpoche's house in India in the afternoons there was sometimes a line of parents holding babies. But it was unusual how much Jetsunma had begun to fuss over one child in the sangha. Earlier in the year she had taken an interest in the pregnancy of one of her longtime students, Chris Cervenka, who had married and become Chris Finney. She summoned Chris and her husband to her house to discuss the coming baby. Chris was a Teutonic blond with an angel face--a good twelve years younger than Jetsunma--who had been a student of hers since the Kensington days and had once seriously considered ordination. In all the seven years she had studied with Jetsunma, Chris had never been summoned to her lama's house. In fact, she had attended hours of teachings inside the stuffy basement in Kensington, had happily made the shift to Poolesville, and Tibetan Buddhism, and had married a man she met at the center--Rick Finney was a journalist and an editor of Tibetan texts--but she had never been a part of the lama's inner circle. She had never been close to Jetsunma or Michael. When special classes were held for the gifted sangha members, Chris had never been included. But she liked it that way. She worked in the gift shop, enjoyed the praying, the community life, the togetherness, had many good friends among the ordained. And she'd always had the vague feeling that proximity to Jetsunma wasn't necessarily a good thing. "I've had a very clear dream about your baby--the kind of dream I've learned to trust," Jetsunma told Chris and Rick. Chris was six or seven months pregnant. "Your baby is a very special tulku. I'm not going to tell you who he is, and I don't want you to even speculate about it, but you'd be amazed. And I can't wait to tell my teachers that he's back!" Later on the whispering began: some even hinted that Jetsunma believed the Finneys' baby to be the reincarnation of Dudjom Rinpoche, a previous head of the Nyingma school. He had died in the south of France four years before. Technically, only very high lamas, like Penor Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama, make claims about another lama's rebirth. And it was unusual for Jetsunma to make this sort of claim. Rebirth and recognitions are tricky things, and usually the work of a group of lamas. But the more Rick thought about it--and he couldn't help thinking about it--he felt it was possible that Jetsunma had the ability to know what she was talking about. If it was true, and Jetsunma was right, it was a great, great blessing. According to Tibetan Buddhism, people die and wander lost and helpless in the bardo for ten to sixteen weeks before they are led--by the force of their karma--to various rebirths.* They can go to hell realms and ghost realms. They can reincarnate as insects and rats. A human rebirth is the most precious, and requires tremendous merit. But when lamas--particularly an enlightened being like Dudjom Rinpoche--die, their mindstreams remain in a pure realm until the time is right or the perfect parental situation comes along. One thing seemed clear: For Dudjom Rinpoche to be reborn in Poolesville would reflect well on Rick and Chris, on Jetsunma, and on the sangha as a whole. It would also be an international event. What would become of their baby? Would the Tibetans want to raise him? Or Jetsunma? In March 1991, when Chris gave birth, Jetsunma seemed shocked to hear that the baby was a girl and not a boy, as she had predicted. "Have you done anything to change the situation? Have you been fighting?" she asked Chris and Rick in the hospital. She believed that the sex of a baby could change in the womb as a result of disturbances in the emotional field. "Well," said Jetsunma, "something has occurred to make the baby change its sex." She held the baby, looked her in the eyes, and gave her the name Eleanore Victoria. Only a few days later Alana called the Finneys at home. She told them that Jetsunma was very upset. Since seeing their baby she'd had a dream that the Finneys "wrapped Eleanore up in a blanket and took her away from me." Rick assured Alana that this would never happen--and the dream prompted him to have a will written, singling out Jetsunma, or a trusted student of her choosing, to become Eleanore's legal guardian in case something should happen to Rick and Chris. As for the baby's status as a tulku, when Eleanore was about a month old, she was examined in the prayer room by Jetsunma, who announced to her parents afterward: "I think we're in luck!" The interest in Eleanore continued to escalate as the months went by. For one thing, the child was lovely--with brilliant red hair and an unusually confident gaze. Jetsunma often asked to hold her and sometimes took her into her own quarters to admire her alone. She had made a point of showing her to various visiting lamas--Choje Rinpoche, Gyatrul Rinpoche, and Ngagchang Yeshe--apparently for their approval. Once Jetsunma bent down to the little girl, who was just beginning to toddle around, and said, "Oh, I had a dream that you were living with me!" Then Jetsunma turned to an attendant and said, "Of course, it might be too early for that, since she's still nursing." Another time, when Rick was bragging a bit about his daughter's seemingly remarkable qualities, Alana looked at him with her cool, impenetrable face and said, "Will you give her to us?" Even though Alana would later claim she'd been joking, Rick had trouble believing her. Eventually the proprietary feeling that Jetsunma seemed to have about Eleanore began troubling the Finneys rather than flattering them. For one thing, Jetsunma seemed often to question their parenting abilities. When Eleanore was two months old and suffering from a bad reaction to a DPT shot, Jetsunma became furious that Rick and Chris had chosen to have their daughter immunized. Their carelessness, she shrieked, had surely harmed Eleanore's delicate chi, or energy flow. It seemed that Jetsunma's low opinion of the Finneys' parenting was infectious. Instead of getting praise for having such a sweet and lovely child, Chris and Rick felt criticized by sangha members--as though people didn't believe they quite deserved to be raising the reincarnated Dudjom Rinpoche themselves. They began feeling nervous and wondering what was being said behind their backs. Word had clearly reached certain members of the Poolesville community that Jetsunma doubted they were raising their child correctly. They were told they were too protective of Eleanore. They held her too much and spent too much time with her: "Put that baby down, for heaven's sake!" one sangha member said huffily to them one afternoon during a teaching. Another time Rick was scolded, "You shouldn't be so attached to Eleanore! You'll only have to let her go in the end." "In Tibet, people weren't so possessive and territorial toward their children," one of Jetsunma's close confidantes told them. Rick began to feel uncomfortable in Poolesville. In his darkest moments he grew convinced that it wasn't Tibetan Buddhism, but something far more homegrown, useless, and certainly not heading anybody toward enlightenment, that was being practiced there. Why was there so much whispering? Why was Jetsunma meddling in their lives? Rick began to worry constantly about his daughter and wife. And about the next baby they had on the way. But he kept quiet and kept his head low. He could see that Chris still believed deeply in Jetsunma and the center. He hoped it would be only a matter of time before she, too, would see things differently. *** Jetsunma had left for Hawaii seeming happy with her new consort, full of hopes for the future. On their return to Maryland she and Sangye stopped in Oregon to visit Gyaltrul Rinpoche, and she was upbeat, even making jokes about Sangye's ability in bed. Once back in Poolesville, though, her mood dropped considerably. She had horrible dreams. She dreamed that all her makeup was removed from her face and all the polish from her nails. She dreamed that she was being stripped down and other realms were calling her. All the masks of samsara were being taken from her--the facades and trickery that she used to lure students to the path. She told Sangye that the dreams meant she was going to die soon. Overcome, Sangye and Alana begged Jetsunma to give them a session with Jeremiah--just one more time--to see what he thought they might do to prevent her death. Afterward, in the Dharma room, the sangha was gathered to hear the outcome of the meeting. Indeed, their lama was close to death, they learned. But not a death as much as "a moving on." She was taking off her fingernails and makeup and getting ready for her next incarnation. The students were stunned by the news, and many sat with tears in their eyes. Alana jumped in when the pitch became emotional. "There's hope. We have a chance to save her. We could have lost her, but we still have a chance to keep her." Jeremiah had told Alana and Sangye that the students in Poolesville had very low merit--in fact, their merit had totally run out. The only thing holding the center together was the combined good karma of Sangye and Alana. And since the students were causing the obstacles, the students must try to turn the situation around. The solution: Eight more stupas needed to be built on the land across the street by Jetsunma's birthday in October. There must be a "stupa garden" within the next six months in order to save Jetsunma's life. It was during the summer of the stupa garden project that a new student, Karl Jones, appeared in Poolesville. He was tall, had a pale romantic presence, had been raised in Ireland and spoke with a faint brogue, and was barely out of his teens. He liked music and liked to think of himself as a composer. He was smart and artistic, too, if not a bit spacey. And he threw himself into the stupa garden project as thought it was a matter of life and death. Which it was, of course. When Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso arrived in Poolesville that summer, the students took to him immediately. The respected scholar was sweet and open, and his English was much better than that of the other Tibetans who'd come around. But it was Karl, in particular, who gravitated toward Khenpo, following him around like a puppy dog. Unlike most new students--who tried hard to fit in with the sangha--Karl never bothered about making friends and being popular. He was a loner and only called attention to himself by being critical. He openly expressed disbelief that more students weren't taking time to study with Khenpo and attend his teachings. He was also critical of the old-timers, the First Wave, for not appreciating Jetsunma enough and for lacking proper devotion. She was a dakini, a sky walker, a female wisdom being. Nobody seemed to treat her properly. Before long Jetsunma herself was spending time alone with Karl and singling him out at her teachings. "When Karl first came," Jetsunma would say later, "he felt he had an instant awareness of a connection with me. He showed potential for a lot of strength and devotion." In the autumn, when the eight stupas in the stupa garden were completed, Karl took genyen vows for lay practitioners with Khenpo Tsewang. *** They hadn't been together quite one year when Sangye began struggling as Jetsunma's consort. There was love, and lots of sex and very sweet good times--but Correct View had been hard to maintain. For one thing, the inequity in the relationship was very difficult for Sangye. "It was hard to figure out what she needed," he would say later. "Part of serving [as a consort] is knowing what her needs are and trying to meet them as they come up--really serving her in a subtle, effective way, functioning almost like a clairvoyant, knowing her needs before they are even obvious. There aren't many people who could handle that relationship ... "If you really believe that Jetsunma is who she said she is--and who the rinpoches say she is, and who His Holiness said she is--you have to accept that she is going to live an extraordinary and unusual life," Sangye said. "And she will have extraordinary obligations and needs." One night at a sangha meeting, while Sangye sat on the floor of the Dharma room, he said he had a confession to make: "I have failed as a consort." The problem was, he had fallen in love with Jetsunma in an extremely ordinary way. He had fallen in love with Jetsunma as a woman, just a woman. He had become attached--in a selfish, possessive, ego-clinging way. And it had become impossible to see her anymore as guru. Sangye apologized to the sangha for "letting Jetsunma down" and for "letting the sangha down." He appeared to be in real pain and great remorse. Alan sat next to him nodding, "The heat is hot when you're that close to the guru," he said later. "Your stuff comes up very, very quickly, out of the blue, and you realize your mind isn't as stable as you thought. Shockingly unstable ... "I mean," he said, "your pride comes up. Your pride is confronted regularly, just as a man. I mean, she's the boss. And I can deal with an even relationship--man-woman--on equal grounds. I can deal with that. But to have the woman above me, that's hard. [i]Really hard[/i]. And that's the way it has to be if you are married to your guru. You have to be okay with that. But it's difficult to deal with and not feel emasculated...You have to be very strong." Jetsunma decided that Sangye needed to get away from Poolesville for a while, and away from the suffocating atmosphere of temple life. He had yearned to do an intensive retreat, but at KPC there had always been another building to renovate or stupa to build. India. That was where he should go, Jetsunma decided. He could study, and practice, and consider his position as consort. He could recapture his old unselfish, ungrasping view of Jetsunma. And so, in the spring of 1992, Sangye left Poolesville to do a four-month retreat at Penor Rinpoche's monastery in Bylakuppe. Jetsunma even packed his bags. Over dinner in New Delhi, he confessed to a fellow traveler that his goal for the retreat was to recapture Correct View and get over his conflict about the guru-student relationship. There were land mines wherever he walked, but he was determined to get through them and to see Jetsunma as a teacher again, and not as his wife. *** Karl Jones had been described as "very special" all along. He had gotten Jetsunma's attention because of his devotion and musical ability--and quite definitely because of the way he looked. In the winter and spring of 1992, she spent a great deal of time with him, talking about Dharma and their other common interests. She'd always wanted to be a singer, she told Karl. So when he started writing sacred music for Jetsunma, and looked at her with great devotion--the kind of pure devotion that Sangye no longer seemed capable of--she realized that he was a man who could serve her properly. "I work best in collaboration," she said later. And she encouraged Karl to collaborate with her. Quickly they formed a singing group called SkyDancer--with other members of the ordained community and lay sangha--which was dedicated to "promoting compassionate living through musical creations," as the brochures for their concerts would say. Karl seemed to love the way Jetsunma sounded when she sang and only praised her abilities, even though, as one student would later note, "nobody had the guts to tell Jetsunma when she was singing flat, which was about all the time." It was May 1992, and Sangye hadn't been gone a month, when Karl stood up before a packed crowd at a sangha meeting one night and made his own very personal confession: He felt sincerely and profoundly that Jetsunma's salary was too low. He was appalled that the sangha treated her so poorly. "It came out of the blue," Wib would recount later, "and seemed to spring spontaneously from a sincere place of devotion." Jetsunma had the same responsibilities that a president or a CEO of a corporation had, Karl told them. The students sat hushed. So many details and responsibilities were falling to Jetsunma now. She had to run the center, teach, practice. She had to answer questions, and letters and calls. The sangha was growing. The center was growing, and quickly becoming a place for Dharma to flourish in the West. And what about all the sentient beings she was helping? How do you put a price on that? How can you? Some of Jetsunma's oldest students were surprised. They realized--although Karl probably didn't--that she had just received quite an increase in salary after Michael left. The health benefits for her family were paid for by the temple. She had food that was offered to her by students, and groceries that were purchased every week by the temple. Her living expenses were paid for. She had a full-time attendant, a nanny, all paid for. What was there left for her to buy? Karl seemed nearly overcome with devotion. Tears filled his eyes. His pitch continued. Jetsunma had special needs, and great health concerns. Lamas were known to absorb all the negativity around them and keep their students safe from disease. They had to take extra good care of themselves. Yet here they were, giving her a small amount and treating her like the most ordinary of persons. They were in the company of Buddha, a living Buddha, and only offering her the most meager salary--nothing like Michael Jordan was getting to play for the Bulls, nothing like Lee Iacocca got to run Chrysler. The night became emotional, as though Karl's passion, so touching and tender, so well expressed in his faint Irish brogue, had infected the crowd. Emotional speech after emotional speech--declarations of love and worship--followed. They had Buddha right there, in their midst, in Poolesville! God only knew what would happen to them if she ceased to be in their lives. To their way of thinking, Jetsunma's value to them, and to all sentient beings, was inestimable. And once this issue had been raised it was nearly impossible to dismiss. How could they not pay her what she was worth? "If we woke up tomorrow and spiritual value became the coin of the realm," Wib said later, "she'd be Bill Gates." The students who had been with Jetsunma since Kensington began to feel a bit sheepish--and ashamed. Maybe they had taken her for granted. Somehow only a new student, Karl, could see that. Let's double it! Whatever she's getting now, let's double it! But ultimately they did better than that: They decided to give Jetsunma a hundred thousand dollars a year--free and clear of taxes. Three months later, when Sangye returned from India--and learned that Karl Jones had given back his genyen robes and grown out his hair and was engaged to marry Jetsunma--he was stunned. And heartbroken. "I never stood a chance," he said. *** There was a fever of devotion that summer and fall, as though Karl had set the sangha on fire. There had never been a student so devoted, so sincere, so openhearted. He made everybody else look tight and ungenerous. At a Wednesday night teaching, Jetsunma told a roomful of students that Karl had made her come alive again, rescued her, pulled her out of a slump and made her excited about being a lama again. In past lives, Karl had made potent wishing prayers to be with her--and with those prayers he had saved Jetsunma and saved the temple. She went around the room and told her students their faults--the things she'd felt about them for years and hadn't said. "You aren't great beings," she told them. "I told you that just to get your attention. The only way you'd listen to me was to appeal to your egos. But it was a lie." Karl had come, out of the blue, and made them all see how much she was to them, how much they needed her. And how far they still had to go. *** The Dharma room was thick with devotion the night the vote was taken to increase the lama's salary, but not many sangha members who were present that night knew the specifics of the financial situation at the temple. They didn't know how much money came in, where it went, or even how decisions were routinely made. In the early days Michael had looked after the finances, and David Somerville had kept the books. After Michael's departure there was still no formal or elected board of directors, only a small roster of students whom Jetsunma would appoint to help run things. Sometimes she referred to these students as the Board; she later renamed them the Troubleshooters, then the Pilot committee, still after the Transition Team, and then the KPC Finance Committee. But no matter what Jetsunma chose to call it, the duty required unflappable nerves and an enormous amount of Correct view. Bills were paid at the last minute, and creditors were always calling. The mortgages--on the temple and the land across the street--had been close to foreclosure several times. Since its inception KPC had never operated within its means nor obeyed ordinary rules of fiscal caution. Jetsunma didn't seem to believe in caution. She believed in expansion, aspiration, prayer, and a positive attitude. If things weren't working out, it was usually because they weren't dreaming big enough. Time and time again when things looked the darkest, she would envision something even grander, more daring--a new stupa, a school for the children, or a feasibility study on building a KPC waste treatment facility--in anticipation of the new temple, monastery, retreat center, university, and hospice. And the Troubleshooters would somehow have to find a way to pay for it. But the Troubleshooters had their weaknesses. Sherab "curled up in a ball" on her bed and cried rather than make the cold calls and fund-raising pitches that were expected of her during her first year as a member of the Troubleshooters--despite the fact that she'd been in sales. Wib, who had years of experience in marketing--selling corporate jets, telephone systems, pricey vitamins--had many dark nights of the soul looking after the temple finances. Money was sometimes raised for one thing and spent on another, a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul approach that didn't bother some board members as much as it did Wib. "Things were always by the seat of our pants," he said. "As Bob Colacurcio used to say, 'Our feet planted firmly in midair.'" In 1992, Tashi Barry was asked by Jetsunma to manage things. And while Tashi enjoyed the proximity to Jetsunma, it was a job that he grew to dislike. "I was always delegating money issues to other people because it was always so gut-wrenching and upsetting and difficult to deal with personally and emotionally," he said. "We were always on the brink of collapse and foreclosure, and that was hard to live with." The books had always been generally unavailable to the sangha--largely because of the temple's embarrassed circumstances. The students had big dreams and had come to see themselves a certain way: They were custodians of the planet, bringing Dharma to the West. The meagerness of the account balances would have reflected a reality that didn't agree with their sense of purpose. Money was ordinary. Their mission wasn't. And to open the books after 1992, the year Jetsunma's salary was raised to one hundred thousand dollars a year, would have revealed the enormous burden that decision placed on the temple budget. Her salary was now one half of the total operating expenses. The temple raised the ticket prices to empowerments and retreats--teachings that were often free at other Dharma centers around the country. The suggested "tithing" amount rose that year, to three hundred dollars a person per month and six hundred per family. But, aside from Eleanor Rowe and Bob Colacurcio, there weren't many students who actually gave that much. People just did what they could afford. Many of the ordained had already given over their savings and retirement accounts to the temple and didn't make enough in their jobs to tithe large sums. But Jetsunma's dream of building a colossal statue of Amitabha, the Buddha of limitless light, which had been just an ongoing and much kicked-about notion until 1992, now became quite adamant. A model was commissioned. A site was discussed. And to raise money for the project, four sangha members--Wib, Bob Colacurcio, Linda Kurkowski, and Jon Randolph--were sent to Taiwan. The Taiwanese were thought to feel a special connection to Amitabha, unlike Americans, who were unable to see the value of building such a statue. Penor Rinpoche helped arrange for Jetsunma's students to spend three months at a monastery in Taipei, but the foursome returned only partially successful. They had raised nearly a hundred thousand dollars. But the estimate for the statue was five times that amount. Jetsunma had originally wanted a hundred-foot statue, then, after some students with construction and engineering backgrounds got to her, the size was reduced to seventy-five feet. It was difficult to tell Jetsunma no--not just because she was a determined person but because of her divine status. "You could say no," recounted Tashi. "You could. But I never did. Others, like Don Allen and Bob Colacurcio, would worry that some decision was irresponsible, but I never went along with that. My sense was, This is the Buddha saying we need to build a statue, and we just need to do that, no matter what it looks like. And in the past it has always worked. We've always come through and built what we needed to." In the early days, after Penor Rinpoche had prophesied that they would need a large temple--large enough for fifteen hundred--the students had assumed this expansion would happen effortlessly. And when the rinpoche returned in 1988 to give the Rinchen Ter Dzod empowerments, Jetsunma had told her students to expect standing-room-only attendance. But the crowds hadn't come--and Jetsunma declared it was time to get better organized and do more outreach. Wib was assigned the job of drawing new people out to Poolesville, particularly on Sundays, when the teachings were more accessible. Jetsunma specifically wanted to attracted prosperous yuppies and professionals, not the "poverty mentality types," as she called them, who had been circling around the temple for years. And pretty soon Wib began to deliver them. "I'm not sure how he did it," said one nun, "but suddenly there were all these new faces every Sunday--and they were always well dressed, seemed prosperous." Indeed, a new crowd of people and students had begun gravitating to KPC in the early 1990's, particularly as the teachings of the Dalai Lama became more popular and the political issues surrounding Tibet became more well known. Bob Denmark, a successful accountant in Bethesda, was one of the new faces. Another, Bonnie Taylor, was a psychologist and social worker who had spent years searching for a spiritual home and felt she'd found it, finally, in Poolesville. Another new face was Kathy Coon. From an old Yankee family with money, she was already a practicing Tibetan Buddhist when she wandered into the Poolesville center. But Kathy's first impressions weren't particularly positive. "The students seemed so self-absorbed and self-important," she would say later. "And Jetsunma seemed so unlike my own teacher--who was such a steady, humble reflection of affection." But as the years passed, and Kathy felt more starved for a connection with the Dharma and a Tibetan Buddhist environment, she spent time at KPC and eventually came to believe that Jetsunma was an "incredibly powerful teacher" and became "accepting of her." She thought the sangha seemed "corporate" and too well dressed--"all the other Buddhist crowds I'd been around were scraggly and soft," she said--and she'd felt "shy" at first, hadn't known how to contribute or feel special. After she gave her first lump of money, though, in 1992, from a trust fund left by her mother, Kathy discovered she had found a way to make friends. Even members of Jetsunma's inner circle came to know her name. Like Bob Denmark and Bonnie Taylor, who were also prosperous new students, Kathy started getting invitations to special teachings--and pleas, often urgent, to make more offerings. The new students had no idea about Jetsunma's salary, or that its doubling had caused financial stress. But the years passed, the center seemed increasingly desperate for money, and Denmark, Taylor, and Coon each became more involved, giving KPC more of their time and money. "I responded to their desperation," Kathy said, "and also, I wanted to cut through my own clutching. I had my own worries about being too attached to money." Giving it away was supposed to help with that. *** With her divorce from Michael about to go through, and plans for a wedding to Karl in the works, Jetsunma began reflecting upon the hard road behind her. The divorce had been ugly, and had taken a toll emotionally. She found herself concerned about the legacy of bitterness that she felt Michael had left in Poolesville. She wanted her marriage to Karl to heal the sangha and take the group in new directions. And just as she felt it was important for her to reflect on the previous ten years, and the end of her marriage, she felt it was important for the students to have a forum to dispel "negativity" and their hostility toward Michael. She had divorced Michael. Now it was time for the sangha to divorce him, too. Newer students would not have been told about the special meetings held to discuss Michael. The inner circle was always careful to protect newcomers from the darker side of the center--and the things they would not be able to comprehend correctly. Older sangha members were invited by phone to attend one of the three meetings--held in private homes--where students planned to discuss their feelings about Michael and vent honestly, in a sort of group therapy style. They read aloud from nasty letters they had received from him. They repeated the put-downs and criticisms that he had delivered. They shared how Michael had made them feel small and unimportant. He paraded his power, they said, and insinuated hurtful things in Jetsunma's name. Several sangha members had stories that lasted more than an hour. "We all started to share our experience of him," Alana said, "and nobody, nobody, was sorry he had left. Isn't that sad? I had had a terrible time with him, but I thought all along it was just me. He was a powerful person and ran everything--the temple, the office, everything--and he wielded that power. He delivered messages to students, the way I do now, but he made people feel really, really badly." Once Jetsunma got wind of how deeply people felt, she decided to organize one more event: an all-sangha Divorce Party, where students could speak their piece and say good-bye and good riddance to Michael Burroughs once and for all. Several students who heard about the party at the Wednesday night teaching made the decision not to attend. They said they were sick, or had to work, or had to stay home with the kids. "I knew what it was going to be about," said one nun, "and it wasn't for me." The Divorce Party was held in the community room, and a table of food was spread out, along with a big bowl of a strong tequila punch for the lay practitioners. Eighty to one hundred students turned up, took a drink of punch or a shooter of straight tequila, and before long the room took on a cocktail party-like atmosphere, with Jetsunma the presiding presence, sitting off to one side with Karl. On a chair in the middle of the room, an effigy of Michael had been set up. It looked something like a mummy, a piece of cloth bundled up and tightly wrapped with cords. And it had one special feature: a banana had been attached to the cloth to represent Michael's penis. One by one, as the party got rolling, students were encouraged to vent. Many of them had come with prepared remarks, with toasts, gags, and long stories. There were great cheers and applause, and the students began holding their drinks high in the air and shouting. As the night wore on people grew louder and more drunken--at one point all joining in a raucous singing of "Nowhere Man." As a person Michael was really a washout, the stories insinuated, and Jetsunma was well rid of him. Alana arrived at the party with a gag knife stuck in her back and said, "Michael, you were my friend and then you stabbed me in the back." Ayla Meurer, one of Jetsunma's students who had moved from Michigan to be near her, addressed the effigy and complained about how Michael had caused her to suffer. Jetsunma shouted out, "Ayla, you can still walk a line! You aren't drunk enough!" Another student approached the dummy and began a satirical account of Michael's actions--claiming that he had "cross-dressed in front of small children"--and the crowd went wild. The effigy of Michael was propped up in a chair closer to Jetsunma, so that she could watch while students walked up and stabbed it with their knives and forks. A line of six or seven students formed, including one nun in her robes who did a timid dance up to the body and very delicately stabbed it. Reactions to the event were mixed, despite the hilarity and sense of raucous fun. Several Tibetans who were visiting Poolesville at the time returned to India with stories of the party and seemed perplexed and vaguely horrified. Rick Finney, already very doubtful of the goings-on at KPC, was reminded of the "Two Minutes Hate" in George Orwell's 1984. He felt sickened by the proceedings, particularly the sight of a nun stabbing at Michael's effigy. Many others remembered having a good time and feeling exhilarated afterward. "It was done in the spirit of a roast," said one student, "except that the person being roasted wasn't there." Alana would later describe it as "necessary." Jetsunma herself read from a list of grievances against Michael that was three pages long. She told about having a vision of starting a prayer center many years ago--and about how she'd made intense prayers that this vision come true. She had things she wanted to accomplish, and a big center to build. In answer to her prayers, she said, she met this demon. His name was Michael. The audience cheered. Then she approached the dummy and said, "Michael, you look funny. Something's wrong here." Jetsunma made a fist and then punched it into the banana, smashing it flat. "That's more like it!" The room exploded in cheers. At the night's end Jetsunma ordered that the effigy be thrown into the driveway in front of the temple, so everybody would have to drive over Michael on their way home. The bound cloth sat on the blacktop as the cars passed over it with their bighearted bumper stickers: PRACTICE RANDOM KINDNESS AND SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY. Then a sangha member, drunk and carried away, stood over the flattened cloth and urinated on it. *** Jetsunma was going to be married again, and with this decision came a whole new look and wardrobe. Her clothes were becoming increasingly hip and young. The frilly, superfeminine look gave way to black leather jackets and boots, and jeans as tight as she could zip up. Her shopping excursions to nearby malls, and into Washington, D.C., became legendary during this time, but she relied for the most part on ordering clothes from catalogs, and every week boxes arrived for her from Victoria's Secret and Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue. Rather than being dismayed by this apparently unspiritual activity, Jetsunma's nuns seemed proud of her. To them there wasn't anything unspiritual about Jetsunma, and her desires never sprang from ordinary emotions like vanity or lust, only from the compulsion to end the suffering of all sentient beings. And if Jetsunma's personal needs seemed to have increased since she had gotten together with Karl, it was only another opportunity for her students to exercise their devotion. One of the great devotional stories of this time that circulated among the sangha was about Alana and the coat. One afternoon the attendant heard Jetsunma complain that she'd purchased a coat from a catalog--and had been promised immediate delivery--but the garment had been delayed and was now apparently lost in delivery. Alana hated seeing Jetsunma upset or unhappy. She made a few calls. When she learned that the coat was stranded in a Chicago warehouse, and most likely wouldn't arrive in Poolesville for another eight to ten days, she flew to Chicago, took a cab to the shipping warehouse, located Jetsunma's coat, and came home with it that day. There were other stories about clothes. Once Jetsunma saw a pair of carved wooden clogs in a mail-order catalog that were very expensive, and a collection was taken up among the ordained to help her buy them. She didn't want them for herself, Alana explained. Jetsunma needed to buy the clogs so that a particular person in the ordering department at the catalog company would see her name on an order sheet--and that would create the cause of this person to meet Jetsunma in a future life. In the years that followed, this would become the explanation for Jetsunma's apparently liberal spending habits. She bought dresses not because she desired them but because she needed to "make a connection" with the designer. She used her credit card so billing clerks and Visa and MasterCard representatives could meet her in a future life and find the Dharma. "This is how compassionate she is," Aileen said. "She isn't interested in money, or clothes. She only buys all those things so that she can wear them once or twice and then give them away--and the people who wear them afterward are able to make a connection with her." *** When Jetsunma and Karl married in 1993, at the auspicious beginning of the year, it was done outside at the white stupa, under a huge blue sky. Jetsunma performed the service herself. And since there is no such thing as a traditional Tibetan Buddhist wedding ceremony, she made it up, from beginning to end. She held up a double-sided mirror between herself and Karl, and talked about the nature of mind. When they married it was "primordial wisdom" marrying, she said, and then the mirror was passed around and each member of the sangha was to look into it. A chalice was filled with wine, meant to represent "the nectar of bliss and emptiness," and passed around for all to sip from. Jetsunma wore a tight black top and a floor-length full skirt of tiny patches of multicolored silk, which had been made for her by a "sewing team" of students. During the ceremony she handed out a pincushion and a needle with a strand of burgundy thread to each guest. With this wedding, she said, she was "stitching the sangha up," and when they went home she wanted them to sew the thread into a piece of clothing, as a way to remember this day and their own participation in the sangha's "healing." She had another gift for each of the guests--laminated prayer cards with her picture on one side and her long life prayer written by Penor Rinpoche on the other. The mood was jubilant, and there was a palpable sweetness between Jetsunma and Karl. The students had come to trust that the marriage was a good thing because they trusted Jetsunma. Most of them felt they didn't really know Karl well. He was never a go-between as Michael had been. That job was now Alana's. He was not the benevolent and lovable and pure Sangye Dorje, either. Karl had kept to himself, focused his attentions on Jetsunma. 'I've never really been able to talk to him," said one monk. "Nobody gets Karl but Jetsunma," said Alana. Most others agreed. More than anything, Karl seemed very young. Jetsunma was forty-three when she married him, and Karl was twenty-three. The Tibetans in particular seemed fascinated by the age difference and would ask students over and over, How old is he? She had never intended to marry a man so young, Jetsunma eventually explained. They were together because of a "long-standing karmic connection." It was Karl who was supposed to be Jetsunma's consort and by her side during the bulding of the Poolesville center, she said. But because of an unfortunate turn of events in the bardo, where he had lingered too long, Karl had been born twenty years late, in 1969 instead of 1949. It was Karl's fault that he was so young. And it was something that Jetsunma would have to live with. *** Jetsunma called her old consort Sangye into her rooms just a week after her wedding festivities. She felt it was time to talk. In the months since his return from India, and his discovery that she had taken up with Karl, he had moved off temple grounds and become a caretaker on a nearby farm. "I want to talk to you about ordination," Jetsunma said to him. He shook his head. "I'm not going to do that." She reminded him that being the consort of a powerful lama was a tremendous blessing. "And the best way to keep the blessing intact," she said, "is to become celibate and never involved with ordinary women again." Sangye had known it was a blessing to be a consort, but he hadn't heard this other part--about becoming celibate to keep it. "This blessing is very important," Jetsunma said. It might be more potent than any of the stupas he could build or all the hours of sit-down practice he could accomplish. Sangye felt sure of his decision. Even if it was the fastest path to enlightenment, he didn't want to be a monk. He was only twenty-nine. He didn't want to give up sex or the prospect of having a family. And he didn't want to give up drinking and listening to music. He was sure about not becoming ordained. But he could feel Jetsunma working on him sometimes. "Psychically, she was bearing down on me," he said. "I mean, I could really feel it--and I was irritated by it." Eight months later a highly revered Tibetan master, Jigmey Phuntsok, arrived in Poolesville to ordain a new crop of monks and nuns. About a week before the Tibetan was due, Sangye began experiencing a great deal of discomfort--tension, insomnia, frustration. Jetsunma's mind was pressing into his. She was working on him, he said later, she was trying to get him ordained. He began visualizing Jetsunma in front of him one night. And he yelled at her, "Jetsunma! Hear me! I am not going to take ordination!" The next morning when he awoke, Sangye felt a sense of quiet relief. He felt calm, too, for the first time in many months. Something else had happened: He had changed his mind. Why? How? He had faith in Jetsunma, he explained later. "Why would she make me miserable for the rest of my life? Even if it were the best thing, the quickest path, she wouldn't want to make me miserable, would she? So I had faith in her, that she knew best." It was a faith shared by all of the KPC ordained and one they all believed would be unshakable."

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