The Sixteenth Karmapa Goes into Exile - 8
Fifteen Karmapas followed Dusum Khyenpa in Tibet, the last being the sixteenth Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924-81). All Karmapas became accomplished masters of meditation and tantric ritual, but each Karmapa also developed his own personal strengths and channeled his activity into a focus suiting his personality. Some Karmapas were known as accomplished scholars. Others founded monasteries. Still others, like the fifth Karmapa Deshin Shegpa, became the teachers of Chinese emperors or Tibetan kings.
His intimates knew the sixteenth Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje for the sheer strength of his personality. He was a likable autocrat who dominated every gathering he attended with the force of his will. the quickness of his mind, and the disarming effect of his booming laughter. He befriended children and animals and particularly liked birds, often finding them to be reincarnations of deceased followers.
Until the Chinese invasion, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje's life followed the pattern set by the first Karmapa Dusum Khyenpa. Though born in 1924, the same year Calvin Coolidge delivered the first presidential address on radio, the Karmapa's early life in Tibet was straight out of the Middle Ages. He was born into the powerful Athub family, hereditary ministers of the independent kingdom of Derge located in Kham. His childhood was said to be marked by precocious behavior and auspicious signs. As an adult, the sixteenth Karmapa managed and built monasteries, traveled around Tibet giving empowerments and the Black Crown ceremony, and, some would say, performed miracles.
The sixteenth Karmapa's life story begins to diverge from his predecessors when the Chinese invasion of 1950-51 dragged both Tibet and the institution of the Karmapas into the modern era. After nine years of uneasy peace with the occupying Communists, the revolt of Khampa fighters against the Chinese People's Liberation Army threatened to bring down massive repression from Beijing. As we have seen, by 1959, the ranking lamas, including the Karmapa, decided that it was time to flee Tibet for their own safety and to preserve their Buddhist lineages.
The Karmapa had to decide which movable assets to take into exile. Like other powerful lamas in Tibet, the Karmapas accumulated material wealth befitting their spiritual prestige. The economy of old Tibet was a feudal system much like that of medieval Europe. Wealth came from land planted in cash crops or used for grazing, and aristocrats and monasteries owned most of the land. The wealthiest cloisters owned hundreds of acres worked by peasants, serfs, or even slaves. For example, the richest monastery in Tibet, Drepung monastery in Lhasa, was one of the largest landholders in the world, with 185 estates, 20,000 serfs, 300 pastures and 16,000 nomads. [1] Other large cloisters, including the seat of the Karmapas at Tsurphu monastery with more than a thousand monks, controlled fewer assets but were still significant feudal landlords.
The landed riches accumulated over the eight-hundred-year history of Tsurphu all had to be left behind when the sixteenth Karmapa fled Tibet in 1959. However, the Karmapa was able to take along most of the movable religious and art treasures collected by past Karmapas. These included statues of Buddhist deities, important lamas in the history of the lineage, and the Buddha himself; relics and relic boxes made of gold and silver encrusted with jewels; and manuscripts of the Buddhist sutras and commentaries on them by great masters of the past. [2] But the most valuable of all the treasures that the sixteenth Karmapa brought from Tibet was the Black Crown, as we have seen.
With dozens of crates of valuables, the Karmapa's party made its way from Tsurphu into Bhutan. Once safely out of Tibet, the Karmapa started making plans to reestablish the activity of the Karma Kagyu school in exile. Bhutan was being overwhelmed by refugees, so the Karmapa decided to look elsewhere to settle. Sikkim was home to many Karma Kagyu devotees and already had a monastery founded by the ninth Karmapa Wangchuk Dorje four centuries earlier (now known as Old Rumtek monastery), located about fifteen miles outside the capital city of Gangtok. In 1959 Chogyal Tashi Namgyal invited the Karmapa to settle in Sikkim, as he had done when the Karmapa paid a visit to the kingdom four years earlier. Now the Karmapa was ready to accept. But there were some in Sikkim who did not want the Karmapa to move in.
On his previous trip to Sikkim in 1956, the Karmapa had left behind in Gangtok, as an advisor to the Sikkimese royal family, a lama named Gyathon Tulku, who hailed from the seat of Situ Rinpoche at Palpung monastery. The Karmapa hoped that Gyathon would make friends for the Karma Kagyu in Sikkim in preparation for the day when the high lamas might have to flee Tibet. Gyathon was skilled in a cure from traditional Tibetan medicine in which the healer licks an iron ball and spits on a wound or affected area on the patient's body. This made him popular with the royal family and soon he became the personal guru to the Sikkimese queen mother.
Over the course of four years in Sikkim, Gyathon apparently began to take a proprietary attitude to the country, seeing it as his spiritual territory alone. He arranged with the queen mother that he should remain the chief Buddhist lama in the kingdom. After fleeing Tibet in 1959, Dudjom Rinpoche, the head of the Nyingma order, tried to settle in Sikkim, but the royal family asked him to leave, probably to protect the franchise of Gyathon.
After a few weeks as a guest of the Bhutanese royal family when he arrived from Tibet in 1959, the Karmapa decided to move on to India. At the border, he met a representative of the Sikkim Chogyal, who renewed the king's earlier invitation for the Karmapa to settle in Sikkim. The Karmapa accepted, and proceeded with his party to Gangtok.
The following year, the queen mother and Gyathon Tulku formed a private alliance to evict the Karmapa from the tiny kingdom. If the Karmapa could be expelled from Sikkim, then Gyathon could invite his traditional guru, Situ Rinpoche, a boy of six at the time, to settle in the kingdom. Once Situ came of age, he could then take over Gyathon's position as spiritual advisor to the royal family. To save Sikkim for Tai Situ, Gyathon opposed the Karmapa settling in Sikkim. He tried to influence the Chogyal to keep the Karmapa out. But the strong support of two of the Karmapa's followers in the Sikkim administration. Tashi Dundur Densapa and Tratin Sherab Gyaltshen Kazi, swayed the Chogyal towards the Karmapa.
Against his mother's wishes, in 1960, the Chogyal insisted on offering the Karmapa seventy-five acres to build his monastery in exile, thus killing Gyathon's plans. In recognition of the service of Densapa and Gyaltshen. in the following year the Karmapa invited the two Sikkimese administrators to join the board of the Karmapa Charitable Trust. Disgraced for opposing the well loved Karma Kagyu leader, in 1967 Gyathon was forced to announce that he would not reincarnate as a tulku in the future. The sixteenth Karmapa confirmed that there would be no further incarnations of Gyathon Tulku. Yet, even after his death soon afterwards, Gyathon's legacy continued to create contention between Tai Situ and the management of Rumtek, as we will see.
On land adjacent to the old Rumtek monastery, from 1962 to 1966, the sixteenth Karmapa constructed the new Rumtek Dharma Chakra Center. The Karmapa also obtained help from the Indian government of Jawaharlal Nehru, which made an immediate grant to build an assembly hall and living quarters for the monks. Rumtek would be the Karmapa's monastic seat in exile until his death in 1981.
Later, a lama who had fled Tsurphu in 1959 and settled in Ladakh, Drupon Dechen, suggested rebuilding Tsurphu if the Chinese government would allow it. The Karmapa was lukewarm to this plan. Even if the monastery had not been razed during the Cultural Revolution, it still would have lost all its "blessing" -- had become desanctified -- under Communist control. The Kartnapa did not want to live in Tibet under the Chinese. He considered Rumtek his new seat and apparently did not look back. Nonetheless, after the Karmapa's death and the beginning of Chinese liberalization it) Tibet in the early 1980s, Drupon Dechen would lead an effort to rebuild Tsurphu in the Karmapa's name, working with Tai Situ and his aide Akong Rinpoche. In 1992, Tai Situ would place his Karmapa candidate Ogyen Trinley at the rebuilt monastery.
At Rumtek, the sixteenth Karmapa received an endless stream of devotees, from Tibetan refugees to Indian generals and Bollywood movie stars. In the 1960s, he also met his first Westerners, including Ole and Hannah Nydahl. In 1974, at the invitation of the Nydahls and other European followers, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje became the first Karmapa to leave Asia and visit the West. He traveled to Europe, providing Westerners with their first experience of the Black Crown ceremony. On this trip, he astonished his new foreign students with many small miraculous acts of kindness. When presented with children for a blessing, the Karmapa would smile broadly and try to engage them in playful conversation with his few words of English.
He also showed kindness to animals, particularly towards birds. While driving around European cities he had never before visited, he would often ask to stop at a particular spot, which would just happen to contain the largest shop selling birds in town. Bounding our of the car, the Karmapa would stride into the store, and listen to the birds. "That one tells the finest stories, but this one over there only talks nonsense," he would say. When he put his hand in a cage, the bird he wanted would fly to him. Then he would say mantras and blow on the birds, explaining that he was teaching them to meditate.
Two years later, in 1976, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, by then a popular spiritual figure in the West, invited the Karmpapa to the United States. After, leaving Scotland in 1970 Trungpa established himself in Vermont. Later, he founded dozens of Dharmadhatu centers (which later became Shambhala centers) around the United States. At Trungpa's centers, the Karmapa performed the Black Crown ceremony to large crowds. Visiting the Hopi Indians in Arizona, the Karmapa even brought rain to end a long drought.
The Karmapa paid his final visit to the United States in 1981 to get treatment for cancer at a hospital in Zion, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
Deathbed Tension
When the Karmapa was dying in 1981, a few of the highest Kagyu lamas came to the cancer hospital near Chicago. Shamar and Jamgon accompanied the Karmapa from Hong Kong, where he had undergone an operation. Gyaltsab stayed behind at Rumtek. In Karmapa: The Politics of Reincarnation, Lea Terhune wrote that he was fulfilling his traditional role there as the Karmapa's "regent."
Yet, although the title gyaltsab means "regent" in Tibetan, as we have seen, the Gyaltsab tulkus had not served as regents of the Karmapa since the seventeenth century. A more likely explanation tor Gyaltsab's absence was that he could not afford the plane fare. Numerous Karma Kagyu lamas did not come to Chicago, because, at that time, before the days of large donations to Tibetan lamas from abroad, it was too expensive for them to fly from India to the United States. Situ was already in Scotland, so his ticket to Chicago was affordable, and he arrived there just after Shamar and Jamgon.
But according to Shamar, Situ Rinpoche came to Chicago only after urging from Jamgon. Two weeks earlier, Situ had visited the Karmapa in Hong Kong. Afterwards, Situ flew to Europe to preside over a conference for all his European centers that he had planned for months, and apparently he was not eager to leave the conference to see the Karmapa after so short an absence.
Jamgon Kongtrul called Situ from the Chicago hotel room he was sharing with Shamar, who heard Jamgon's side of the phone call. "Jamgon Rinpoche begged Situ to come and said His Holiness Karmapa's condition was serious, he was probably going to die soon," Shamar told me. "Situ Rinpoche still did not want to leave his conference. Then, Jamgon Rinpoche told him that he did not want to be responsible for Situ Rinpoche being away from His Holiness's passing, so Situ Rinpoche agreed to come to Chicago, but for two days only."
A few days later, Tai Situ arrived in Chicago. Shamar remembers that "he came with a changed attitude. Situ Rinpoche forgot his former important business, and now he was quite anxious to remain at His Holiness Karmapa's bedside until me end. I am not sure why he changed like this. Perhaps he wanted to show that he was the Karmapa's favorite disciple?"
Shortly after Tai Situ arrived in Chicago, he asked Shamar for a favor: to attend the conference in Brussels in his place. The event was due to start in a few days and last for a week. Situ told Shamar that if he himself went to Brussels as he had originally planned, then as the organizer of the meeting he would be bound by contract to remain for the duration of the conference. This would keep him away from Chicago for eight or nine days, and he would almost certainly miss the Karmapa's last moments.
However, if Shamar would attend the event in Situ's place, as a stand-in, he would be able to put in a cameo appearance and then excuse himself after a day or two to return to the Karmapa's bedside. Situ repeated this request several times and, according to Shamar, this wore down his own hesitation. "There were several witnesses to this conversation," Shamar said. [3]
"At that time, I was Situ's best friend," Shamar explains. "His family had been very kind to my mother after she escaped Tibet in 1959 and lived in Darjeeling. So I felt sorry for him and was willing to do him this favor if I could really get back before His Holiness would pass away." Before agreeing to Situ's request, however, Shamar asked Situ to do a mo (prediction) to see if the Karmapa would live beyond the three or four days that he would be away from Chicago, including time in Brussels and round-trip travel.
In front of Shamar's brother Jigme (a lama who ran the Karmapa's monasteries in France beginning in the mid-seventies) as well as Topga Rinpoche, at the time the second-ranking administrator at Rumtek, Jamgon Kongtrul, and others, Situ cast the ritual dice, consulted his book of interpretation, and assured Shamar that the Karmapa would not die in his absence. The hospital staff also said that the Karmapa would probably live another twelve to fifteen days. So the next day Shamar left for Brussels.
When he arrived in Brussels, Shamar was surprised to hear from the conference organizers that there would have been no difficulty for Situ himself to have come for two or three days and then leave, especially under the circumstances. Later, Chogyam Trungpa, the lama who had become so prominent in the United States, reportedly would claim that his former attendant Akong Rinpoche, now Situ's confidant, had developed this plan as a pretext to get Shamar away from the Karmapa. According to Trungpa, Situ wanted Shamar out of the way so he could forge a prediction letter and then, after the Karmapa's death, Situ could present the forgery as a letter written by the Karmapa.
As it turned out, the Karmapa died on November 5, 1981 while Shamar Rinpoche was in transit from Europe back to the United States. Nonetheless, if Situ or any other lama had wanted to forge a letter at this time, the presence of Jamgon, Jigme, Topga, and others who saw that the Karmapa wrote no letter would have prevented it.
Situ, and his sympathizers have claimed that it was the sixteenth Karmapa himself who sent Shamar to Brussels so that Tai Situ could remain at his bedside. Both Lea Terhune and Mick Brown have asserted this in their books on the Karmapa. As Brown put it, "There was a Buddhist conference going on in Belgium, to which Tai Situ had been invited as the Karmapa's representative. But the Karmapa said he wanted Tai Situ to stay with him, and that Shamar should go to Belgium instead." Brown concluded that for some observers, this decision represented the sixteenth Karmapa showing a preference for Situ over Shamar. [4] Other critics of Shamar have accused him of being amiss in absenting himself from the last moments of the late Karmapa's life while Tai Situ remained in Chicago, attending his guru as a good disciple.
However, this story does not accord with the facts. The conference in Brussels was nor organized by the Karmapa, but by Tai Situ himself. And, it is unlikely that the Karmapa could have talked to either Shamar or Situ about the event: since his stay in Hong Kong, the cancer that had spread to his throat had destroyed the Karmapa's ability to speak, or even to swallow food and water. In Chicago, the ailing leader was fed intravenously.
"This seems to be a case of no good deed going unpunished," Shamar told me. "His Holiness Karmapa didn't even know that I had left and he was expecting me to return the next morning. After my departure Jamgon Rinpoche informed His Holiness that I had gone to Europe for Situ Rinpoche's conference. Gyalwa Karmapa did not say anything, since he couldn't talk. I heard later that he just smiled ironically.
"It was a painful lesson for me. I started to grow up at this time. I was too trusting and too inexperienced."
A Vulnerable Legacy
At the time of his death in 1981, the sixteenth Karmapa left a network of more than a hundred Karma Kagyu Buddhist centers with thousands of devotees around the world. This network had the potential to spread the teachings of Buddhism to millions of people and to help Karma Kagyu teachings take deep root on foreign soil. In the future, the network of dharma centers would also develop the potential to funnel millions of dollars in donations per year back to Rumtek for the activities of the next Karmapa.
But in the Karmapa's time, and just after his death, his administration operated on a strictly hand-to-mouth basis. "Back then, no Tibetan lamas had any money," Shamar told me. "Monasteries were very poor. Rumtek was actually better off, because of the reputation of the late Karmapa. Local Sikkimese would give him enough to pay the daily expenses. People would give ten or twenty rupees each. But money for building or growing, there was none. Tibetan lamas only started getting large donations in the mid-eighties. Then, Taiwan opened up to foreigners, and many lamas went there. Afterwards, money started coming from the West too."
During his lifetime, the sixteenth Karmapa followed a relaxed and seemingly idiosyncratic approach to fund-raising that sometimes baffled his staff. His personal painter of thangkas (religious icons) at Rumtek was Karma Norbu. When I met him in France in 2003, he was a slim man in his sixties who told me a story about how the Karmapa liked to raise money tor the monastery's support.
Norbu had long felt that there was a greater potential to reach out to wealthy followers and il\crease large donations to Rumtek. One day, he mentioned this to the sixteenth Karmapa. The Karmapa laughed, and then took Norbu to see the ledger where donations were recorded. What he saw there confirmed his thinking, but surprised him in its extent. There were few large donations from the wealthy. Instead, nearly every line item was a small offering from someone very poor: one or two rupees or even just a few paise from rickshaw pullers, rag pickers, cleaning women, or subsistence farmers with no more than a half dozen chickens to feed their families.
"Bodhisattvas like the Karmapa think differently than normal people," Norbu told me. "The Karmapa said that he actually preferred to receive small donations from the poor rather than large gifts from more comfortable people. This was shocking to me. Why take from the poor, who can so little afford to give? But that was exactly the Karmapa's point. When rich people give money, it is not much of a sacrifice for them and just increases their pride. But when the poor give, it is difficult. Their offering has much more value to them, and thus creates not pride but devotion in their minds, which is what they need to make spiritual progress."
When the Karmapa traveled, he did receive larger donations, but they were small compared to what high lamas would start to get in the eighties and nineties. Most of the money he received went to pay for his treatment at the cancer hospital in Chicago at the time of his death. He also received donations of land, principally a parcel in the Dordogne area of France. where he built the biggest Tibetan dharma center in Europe, Dhagpo Kagyu Ling. On a smaller parcel in Woodstock, New York, he began building his North American headquarters, Karma Triyana Dharmachakra.
While the sixteenth Karmapa lived, the international network of Karma Kagyu centers was firmly tied to Rumtek. His death left his fragile legacy vulnerable as it left control over the Karma Kagyu uncertain.
Never before had the transition from one Karmapa to the next occurred with the chief lamas of the Karma Kagyu so at odds over who had the authority to choose the Karmapa. To make things worse, a Karmapa had never been found and recognized in exile either. At Tsurphu, the Karmapa's labrang had the experience of choosing fifteen generations of Karmapas in the familiar social environment of Tibet. In exile, the sixteenth Karmapa's reconstituted administration at Rumtek was inexperienced in the ways of the modern world.
The old-style administrators of the Karmapa's labrang knew little about asserting property rights, gaining allies in local and national governments, and marshaling support from the new devotees of the Karma Kagyu around the world. In Tibet, though politics had usually played into tulku searches, the Karmapa's strong labrang had never needed to mount an active public outreach program to support a search for a new Karmapa. The previous Karmapa's chief disciples chose his successor quietly amongst themselves. In exile, by contrast, external alliances and legal cases would determine the future of the Karma Kagyu leader.
