The Contemporary Kalachakra Ambience

I had my first real encounter with the Kalachakra tantric tradition in the winter of late 1973. His Holiness the Dalai Lama was to give a public Kalachakra initiation, and I planned to attend.

At the time the initiation was announced I was living and studying in Dharamsala, India. The wave of excitement that ran through the Tibetan community was almost tangible.

The site of the initiation was to be Bodh Gaya, a sleepy little temple village a few miles south of the city of Gaya, Bihar.

Bodh Gaya also has the distinction of being the spiritual center of the buddhist world, at least in the sense of its early history. It is here that Gautama the monk sat under the bodhi tree and manifested the state of enlightenment, here that he became the Buddha. Of the eight great places of buddhist pilgrimage in India, it is accorded the position of the most sacred of all. In fact, some buddhist traditions even state that all one thousand buddhas of this era who perform the role of universal teachers manifest their earthly enlightenment in Bodh Gaya.

It might also be added that Bodh Gaya in the twentieth century is not exactly a model spiritual center. The Turkic Muslim invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had laid much of the area waste. The Muslims were especially harsh on buddhism in India. It is said that the nearby monastery of Nalanda was surrounded, and all the monks beheaded on the spot. The walls of every room are said to have been covered in blood. The temples and libraries were burned, and the hands and faces broken off any stone images that were discovered.

To put it bluntly, Bodh Gaya had seen better days; or at least that is how it seemed in 1973. It had never really recovered from the Muslim onslaught. It seemed to have become a smattering of grotty tea shops and grottier restaurants. The buildings that constituted the village, as well as the designated “slum dwellings” behind the stupa, could at best be called the most meager of human habitations.

The principal stupa and the sunken gardens around this wonderful monument, however, are marvelous, and contain a descendent of the original tree under which the Buddha had achieved his illumination. They also house numerous stone images and temple artifacts that had escaped destruction during the Muslim period, largely due to having been buried before the final attacks.

After the Muslim purges Bodh Gaya fell out of use as an international pilgrimage center. Buddhists around the world began to develop alternate pilgrimage sites in more congenial and accessible locations. The result was that the Central Asians began to look to Lhasa as the replacement; the Chinese to Wutai-shan, the Five Mountain Peaks; the Japanese to Kyoto; and so forth.

Bodh Gaya saw a small flurry of activity in the 1950s, when Prime Minister Nehru invited the governments of numerous buddhist countries around the world to each build a temple in the area, offering to donate land for the project. As a consequence, over the years since then a dozen or so temples have appeared.1

By 1973 the flood of Tibetan refugees to India in the late fifties and early sixties had sparked fresh buddhist activities in Bodh Gaya. The presence of great Tibetan lamas at Bodh Gaya every winter, as well as of throngs of Tibetan pilgrims, in turn intensified the interest of the buddhist peoples of the various Himalayan kingdoms:

from Ladakh, Lahoul, Spiti and Kinnaur on the west, to Sikkim, Bhutan and upper Arunachal Pradesh on the east, all of whom practice Tibetan buddhism. During the winter months, when the Bihar weather becomes survivable, thousands of people would make the journey to the Place of Enlightenment, the Diamond Seat.

The fact that the Dalai Lama himself was to give the Kalachakra initiation in such a holy place for the first time had the Himalayan buddhist world buzzing.

Two months before the initiation was to begin the crowd of pilgrims began to gather. Most of them wanted to do some hundreds of thousands of repetitions of their principal mantra practice during the pilgrimage; or perhaps a hundred thousand full length bodily prostrations. Others would set as their objective circumambulating the great stupa several thousand times. The Dalai Lama’s initiation would be the crescendo, the grand finale, to their devotions.

The Kalachakra initiation is, for the Central Asians, something of a buddhist festival. Entire villages and tribes come, with babies, adolescents, middle-aged people and grandparents. Those too young, old or weak to walk are carried.

Businesses spring up everywhere, to buy from and sell to the crowd. Most pilgrims bring a few items to sell in order to pay their way back home, small articles of antiquity being the most usual. Roadside shops-on-ablanket are everywhere. In the Bodh Gaya initiation of 1985 some entrepreneur even brought in a circus, with ferris

wheels and merry-gorounds. The atmosphere is one of revelry and celebration. The only Western equivalent I can think of is Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind.” Having a strong nomadic sense, the Tibetans seemed little concerned by the lack of facilities at Bodh Gaya. Some stayed at the scant

accommodations to be had at the local temples; others rented balconies or huts in nearby villages; but the vast majority simply put up tents by the river, wherever they could find an empty spot. The Indian army moved in and installed a vast network of water taps and portable toilets, and before long a tent city of more than a hundred thousand had sprung up. In the 1985 Kalachakra initiation in Bodh Gaya twelve years later, more than three hundred thousand people descended upon the area.

It should be noted here that very few of those attending an initiation of this nature would plan on ever seriously undertaking the yogic practices found in the Kalachakra tradition and discussed in this book. Perhaps one in a hundred would even adopt a simple daily recitation practice, such as the guruyoga text found here in

Chapter Eighteen. Maybe one in a thousand would aspire to ever actually practice the six yogas; and of those, only a dedicated handful would ever actually get around to performing the meditation retreat that constitutes the essential training.

For most attenders, the purpose of sitting through the initiation ceremony would not be to receive empowerment as a permission to enter into the yogic endeavors, but rather to have the opportunity to bask in the bright rays of spiritual communion with the initiating lama, in this case His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and hopefully to absorb a sprinkling of spiritual energy from the occasion. As well, the hope would be to generate karmic seeds that establish a link with the lama and also with Shambala, the mythological pure land of the Kalachakra doctrine.

Most public Kalachakra initiation ceremonies are preceded by five or six days of essential buddhist teachings. These usually begin at about noon and continue until dusk, with everyone sitting on blankets in the sun, the children playing games between the islands of adults. Mothers breast feed their babies while the older people

snooze discreetly in the shade, the steady melody of the Dalai Lama’s rich voice flowing over them in waves from a network of loudspeakers. The subject of discussion during these preliminary days is much along the lines of the ideas presented by the Seventh Dalai Lama in The Prerequisites of Receiving Tantric Initiation,

included here as Chapter Fifteen. After these fundamental teachings have been given the actual initiation process commences, beginning with a day of lama dances, in which the place of initiation is claimed and consecrated. This is then followed by either two or three days of initiations, and generally a day of spiritual celebration in the

form of a gurupuja ceremony, in which the lama gives his parting advice to the crowd. Finally the entire group of however many tens of thousands of initiates lines up and files in single column through the temporary chapel in which the Kalachakra sand mandala has been constructed, and then past His Holiness in order to receive an individual hand blessing.2

Thus the entire event traditionally takes place over a period of ten or twelve days, with the crowd gathering each day at noon and sitting until early evening, before and after each session scurrying hurriedly to accomplish the mundane tasks of the day, like finding food, relocating lost children, washing off some of the dust that now

hangs in clumps from one’s body, avoiding being trampled by the frantic mobs in motion, and so forth. Meanwhile the businessmen continue to ply the crowds in an effort to profit from the spiritual intensity of the moment; and there is also the occasional conflict, such as the time when, during one of the Dalai Lama’s afternoon talks, a Bhutanese farmer stepped over a Khampa nomad’s coat and received a serious knife wound for his indiscretion.

Such was my initial contact with the Kalachakra tradition. It was more like a fantastic, mystical, tantric party that continued day and night for two weeks, than a solemn religious event. Babies were born; old people died; lamas and meditators sat practicing their devotions under every tree and in every nook and cranny; and lovers slipped off to the riverbanks at night to share the joys of the heart. All of them were equal in their temporary

orbit around the Kalachakra sand mandala that stood at the middle of the village and now served as the center of our universe. The spiritual energy rose from the earth in waves, like heat on a distant horizon. Sleep became pervaded by dreams so vivid it became difficult to separate waking from dream experiences. Then suddenly it was over, like the culmination of a marathon race, with only a few stragglers left as evidence.

The crowd dispersed slowly, as though reluctant to leave a gathering that holds promise of further adventure. Many eventually continued on pilgrimage through the holy places for a month or two, before returning home to their Himalayan mountains and valleys; to their farms or herds; to their monasteries, nunneries and hermitages; or to the refugee settlements scattered across India, from Ladakh in the north to Mysore in the south.

Since that time His Holiness has given the Kalachakra initiation on numerous occasions, several of which I had the fortune to attend. As I write, there is talk that he will give it three times in the following year: one in Mongolia, another in Dharamsala, and the third in New York.