Diary Page: Arrival
At 5 p.m. we arrive in Lenzkirch for the Dorje Sempa retreat with Sabchu Rinpoché. It is my first retreat with him and actually the first he is conducting in this format in Europe.
At the edge of the village up on the hill we find the house. It looks much like the other small hotels we have come past but big bright prayer flags in the garden tell us we are in the right spot. There is one neighbouring house towards the village. Across the street there’s the forest, down the road there’s the forest.
We notice people on the terrace and garden in the back of the house and are lucky to find Rinpoché there. We get a very warm welcome and start unpacking the car. My daughter Emily and I share a room with a friend we haven’t met yet. I’m curious to see who it will be. I hope she won’t mind my bringing my youngest, who is 8 years old. Part of our car’s load comes from the Obermoschel shrine room. At Rinpoché’s request we are bringing the ritual drums and cymbals. We enter what used to be a side room of an oak-furnished restaurant area in a Black Forest hotel and find it has been turned into a lavish temple with a beautiful shrine, thankas and offerings. Light offerings extend the sacred atmosphere also to the area just outside the shrine room.
Rinpoché and the Geislingen sangha have been here since the morning. Their workin preparing the temple on this Day 0 of our 7-day retreat is only the tip of an iceberg of preparing and organizing which the Geislingen sangha, who have requested the retreat have put joyful effort in. People keep arriving, greeting Rinpoché, settling into their rooms, and mellowing out on the terrace. Later we go out with Rinpoché for dinner. People keep dropping in at the restaurant. It is quite an international crowd here: people have come from Poland and Russia, Austria and France and of course the various regions of Germany. In the evening, it is announced, Rinpoché will be doing a Chenrezig meditation with us. I come to realize I had no idea of what I was getting myself into. I’ve brought my Ngöndro text thinking I would be equipped for a Dorje Sempa retreat that way andleft all other texts at home. Thank goodness there are enough texts to be shared.
On Using the Jargon and Learning the Form
Since surprisingly most of the participants have arrived on Day 0 already, Rinpoché is so generous to give us a first teaching that night. He explains about the idea of the retreat, which is conceived as a miniature version of a three-year retreat with 6 thüns a day, a thün being what we would call a session. Rinpoché doesn’t think it is appropriate to be using the English term, which, unlike the Tibetan term, has so many connotations, like e.g. that of seeing a psychotherapist or psychiatrist. He thinks it is time that we start using the jargon, so this is the beginning of a glossary of Tibetan words and their meanings that we will be wrapping our minds around in the next couple of days.
He also gives us a whole lot of „housekeeping rules“ as Rinpoché calls them, like not entering the shrine room if one is late for a thün, how and when to do prostrations and the like. I remember finding myself amused by a book in which it was explicitly said that the Buddhist teacher’s job was to „tame“ the students. Now Rinpoché is similarly explicit with us, generously explaining which form to give, in our physical expression, to our gratitude and reverence towards the dharma. People in the West in particular, he explains, are often more interested in the wisdom than in the form. He feels it is necessary to educate us in the form, because we need to know the conventionin order to go beyond the convention. He wants us to learn the form not only of the practice, but also of a retreat: how it is nicely encapsulated by a smoke puja at the beginning and at the end to mark this sacred period of time that is such a wonderful opportunity.
Being his modest self, Rinpoché also explains he will teach us how to behave with someone who we can see as a Buddha and who we will want to become our teacher. He would volunteer to be our test Rinpoché for a „test drive“ where we learn how to do prostrations and how and when to present a khata and the like. This is going to be fun!
Rinpoché as umze
It is on the first evening already that I also come to realize that practicing in the group with Rinpoché will not always just be hunky-dory. We’ve just started Chenresig practice when Rinpoché stops while we are continuing to recite a repetition of the four-line refuge prayer. He points out that, although it is customary, there is no particular instance in which you can be sure that the refuge will be recited three times. When practicing together, it is up to the umze to lead and it is up to us to listen.
There are quite a handful of instances when he stops to point out he is not hearing the melody, or more precisely he is hearing the melody from us but also with variations intermixed. Explaining about the drupönsetting boundaries for düntsam and being authority on when to practice and the entire setting, Rinpoché made jokes and exuded his kindness in an elegant way.
But now is the first time when I realize how serious this situation is and that Rinpoché has this strict face, too. He wants us to pay close attention to what the umze is doing not only so we can all do these practices also by ourselves, but also because he will be asking people to be umze for some thüns that he will dedicate to private interviews.
Later in the düntsam he will be interrupting the practice to say how much better we’ve become at following and more than once to fill us in with some information or even toshare a joke, which works, because we have, to an extent, learned to respect the umze’s lead. He stresses the umze’s absolute authority on how the particular practice is conducted at a particular venue and at a particular given time by saying: Even Karmapa follows the umze.
On Reverence, Prostrations and Behaviour in the Shrine Room
In the transition of Tibetan Buddhism to the West many people and centres have come up with simplified approaches to expressing reverence to the three jewels. So we are not necessarily used to doing prostrations in the shrine room and many other gestures that Rinpoché relates to us. We might not even be aware of the depth of these customs.
Rinpoché asks us to do three prostrations upon entering the shrine room, to be on time for the thüns or stay outside, to do three prostrations when the teacher has sat down, and three prostrations upon re-entering if we had to leave the shrine room before the end of the thün.
To maintain the sanctuary in the shrine room we should try to talk as little as possible, we can experiment with sitting positions if we can’t sit in the half or full lotus so long, but should not stretch out our legs out towards the shrine. That is just a total faux pas in terms of reverence. That night I go to bed prostrating myself three times before lying down, like Rinpoché asked us to do. He knows his teacher Sherab Gyaltsen Rinpoché does it and the late Shamar Rinpoché did it and I feel strangely connected bowing to the three jewels that night and very grateful to the lineage and to Rinpoché for taking our quest so seriously and conveying this knowledge and not a stripped-down or watered-down version of Tibetan Buddhism.
A slight doubt surfaces: Am I sure it is not exaggerated or an expression of fascination to be into this cultural conundrum? But at the bottom of my heart I know I agree with Rinpoché: This is the tradition and you have to know the tradition, which comes to us as content and form, and we have to know the form to eventually feel free to go beyond the form. How else would we make an educated choice as to which parts might be a suitable practice for ourselves? So I am curious to see how I will come out of this.