THE OLDEST BOY

Fall Issue No. 64 Winter 2014 Issue No. Fall 2014 2014 Issue No. 6462

the oldest boy

© Kenro Izu, Pak Ou Cave, Lao #2, 1997. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2014, Issue Number 64 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary

vibrator play and her gift for drawing audiences into the most intimate crevices of a life and a world and then illuminating the foundations of that world in ways that are both playful and profound. In The Oldest Boy, an American woman married to a Tibetan émigré welcomes visiting Tibetan monks who come to believe that her three-year-old son is the reincarnation of an important lama and ask to take the child to India for spiritual training. She and her husband must decide if they can let their son be taken away. Crafted in Sarah Ruhl’s distinctive style, The Oldest Boy is marked by wit, emotional truth, and coruscating language.

The current Review seeks to elucidate the particulars of the world of the play—Buddhism and Tibetan culture—but also includes essays that speak to the universal themes of mentorship, cross-cultural relationships, and a mother’s struggle to let go of her child. Sarah Ruhl herself writes about motherhood, Tibet, and puppets in an essay that reveals how a midwestern Catholic girl came to write

the oldes t boy

André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack Kewsong Lee

Winter 2014 Issue No. Fall 2014 Issue No. 6462

Lincoln Center audiences will remember Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House and In the Next Room or the

a play about Tibetan Buddhism. Exploring a Westerner’s experience of practicing Buddhism, we have an interview with the performance artist Laurie Anderson about her own beliefs and how they informed

Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Isabel Rose Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Barbara Walters Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

her approach to the death of her husband, Lou Reed. The actor, writer, and activist Yangzom Brauen Sarah Ruhl Answers Five Questions

describes growing up in Switzerland in a household where the Tibetan traditions of her grandmother

5

and her mother, Tibetan refugees, often collided with the Western way of doing things. Providing a window into Buddhist monasticism, we have a special interview with the senior tutor of His Holiness the The Dreadful Child

by Kate Braestrup

Dalai Lama, a revered position that has been passed, through reincarnation, from the seventeenth

7

century to the present. His Eminence the Seventh Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche was born in Dharamsala in 1985, and recognized in 1987 as the reincarnation of the sixth Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche. The

Proximate Fires

by Idra Novey

chaplain and memoirist Kate Braestrup writes about the fierce maternal need to keep a child safe,

11

and the accompanying challenge of raising a child who must be released into the world. Recounting a summer trip to her Chilean husband’s homeland, the poet, translator, and novelist Idra Novey describes being a mother in a foreign world. And the writer and folklorist Emily Urquhart offers a poignant look

The Fiftieth Day: An Interview with Laurie Anderson

at the uniquely significant, yet unsung, relationship between mentors and their mentees.

12

In putting together this issue, we were inspired by Ruhl’s striking ability to write with a deceptively understated beauty and to unfurl big ideas. The Oldest Boy is a powerful play about a specific family in

A Harmonious House

by Yangzom Brauen

an unusual dilemma, but it is also about motherhood, spirituality, and belonging and finally letting go,

17

so this issue arcs across continents and cultures and beliefs to explore these basic human experiences.

—The Editors

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

A Connected Existence: An Interview with His Eminence the Seventh Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Cover collage by Gonkar Gyatso, Buddha Sakyamuni, 2007.

Courtesy of Studio Gonkar Gyatso.

© 2014 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Back cover painting by Phurba Namgay, The Great Game, 2013.

Courtesy of the artist and Linda Leaming.

21

23

From Songs of Spiritual Experience, Selected and Translated by Thupten Jinpa & Jasś ´ Elsner, © 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.

The Rosenthal Family Foundation, Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors, is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

How to Belong

by Emily Urquhart

an excerpt from May I See My Guru Again and Again by Natsok Rangdröl Natsok Rangdröl was born in 1608 and is believed to be a reincarnation of the famous Nyingma master Ratna Lingpa (1403-78). He spent many years of intensive meditation in central Tibet and had visions of meditation deities.

The sky — so w ide and vast— th e cl e a r, radiant su n and mo o n, to g ethe r b r i n g po w erf u l illu minatio n. Tho u g h t h ey ca n n o t s t ay to g ether at o nc e, the brig ht sky a n d the u no bsc u red su n and mo o n ro a m abo u t the fo u r c o ntinents, disp e l l i n g d a rk n e s s.

May I see my g u ru ag ain and a g a i n .

the oldes t boy

3

© Kenro Izu, Pak Ou Cave, Lao #2, 1997. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2014, Issue Number 64 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary

vibrator play and her gift for drawing audiences into the most intimate crevices of a life and a world and then illuminating the foundations of that world in ways that are both playful and profound. In The Oldest Boy, an American woman married to a Tibetan émigré welcomes visiting Tibetan monks who come to believe that her three-year-old son is the reincarnation of an important lama and ask to take the child to India for spiritual training. She and her husband must decide if they can let their son be taken away. Crafted in Sarah Ruhl’s distinctive style, The Oldest Boy is marked by wit, emotional truth, and coruscating language.

The current Review seeks to elucidate the particulars of the world of the play—Buddhism and Tibetan culture—but also includes essays that speak to the universal themes of mentorship, cross-cultural relationships, and a mother’s struggle to let go of her child. Sarah Ruhl herself writes about motherhood, Tibet, and puppets in an essay that reveals how a midwestern Catholic girl came to write

the oldes t boy

André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack Kewsong Lee

Winter 2014 Issue No. Fall 2014 Issue No. 6462

Lincoln Center audiences will remember Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House and In the Next Room or the

a play about Tibetan Buddhism. Exploring a Westerner’s experience of practicing Buddhism, we have an interview with the performance artist Laurie Anderson about her own beliefs and how they informed

Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Isabel Rose Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Barbara Walters Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

her approach to the death of her husband, Lou Reed. The actor, writer, and activist Yangzom Brauen Sarah Ruhl Answers Five Questions

describes growing up in Switzerland in a household where the Tibetan traditions of her grandmother

5

and her mother, Tibetan refugees, often collided with the Western way of doing things. Providing a window into Buddhist monasticism, we have a special interview with the senior tutor of His Holiness the The Dreadful Child

by Kate Braestrup

Dalai Lama, a revered position that has been passed, through reincarnation, from the seventeenth

7

century to the present. His Eminence the Seventh Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche was born in Dharamsala in 1985, and recognized in 1987 as the reincarnation of the sixth Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche. The

Proximate Fires

by Idra Novey

chaplain and memoirist Kate Braestrup writes about the fierce maternal need to keep a child safe,

11

and the accompanying challenge of raising a child who must be released into the world. Recounting a summer trip to her Chilean husband’s homeland, the poet, translator, and novelist Idra Novey describes being a mother in a foreign world. And the writer and folklorist Emily Urquhart offers a poignant look

The Fiftieth Day: An Interview with Laurie Anderson

at the uniquely significant, yet unsung, relationship between mentors and their mentees.

12

In putting together this issue, we were inspired by Ruhl’s striking ability to write with a deceptively understated beauty and to unfurl big ideas. The Oldest Boy is a powerful play about a specific family in

A Harmonious House

by Yangzom Brauen

an unusual dilemma, but it is also about motherhood, spirituality, and belonging and finally letting go,

17

so this issue arcs across continents and cultures and beliefs to explore these basic human experiences.

—The Editors

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

A Connected Existence: An Interview with His Eminence the Seventh Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Cover collage by Gonkar Gyatso, Buddha Sakyamuni, 2007.

Courtesy of Studio Gonkar Gyatso.

© 2014 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Back cover painting by Phurba Namgay, The Great Game, 2013.

Courtesy of the artist and Linda Leaming.

21

23

From Songs of Spiritual Experience, Selected and Translated by Thupten Jinpa & Jasś ´ Elsner, © 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.

The Rosenthal Family Foundation, Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors, is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

How to Belong

by Emily Urquhart

an excerpt from May I See My Guru Again and Again by Natsok Rangdröl Natsok Rangdröl was born in 1608 and is believed to be a reincarnation of the famous Nyingma master Ratna Lingpa (1403-78). He spent many years of intensive meditation in central Tibet and had visions of meditation deities.

The sky — so w ide and vast— th e cl e a r, radiant su n and mo o n, to g ethe r b r i n g po w erf u l illu minatio n. Tho u g h t h ey ca n n o t s t ay to g ether at o nc e, the brig ht sky a n d the u no bsc u red su n and mo o n ro a m abo u t the fo u r c o ntinents, disp e l l i n g d a rk n e s s.

May I see my g u ru ag ain and a g a i n .

the oldes t boy

3

sarah ruhl answers f ive ques t ions 1

How did a Catholic white girl from Illinois come to write about Tibetan Buddhism?

I have three children. My first daughter, Anna, was born shortly before I did The Clean House at Lincoln Center. For eight years, we’ve had a wonderful babysitter named Yangzom. She is from Queens, by way of India, by way of Tibet. Because I often work from home, usually writing in the dining room, Yangzom and I have gotten to know each other very well.

We have shared the strange intimacy of sitting in a room together while she gave a bottle to one of my newborn twins as I breast-fed the other baby. We have administered nebulizers and Tylenol to sick children together, celebrated birthdays together, and rejoiced in first steps together.

Over the years, she has told me many stories—about life in exile in India, and what it was like to escape Tibet with the Chinese army in pursuit, her twelve-day-old daughter strapped to her back as she navigated the Himalayas. When her mother came from Nepal on her first trip to the United States, she visited our home. Yangzom knelt at her mother’s feet, as was the custom, and her mother smiled at my children, and silently prayed, for hours. I was raised in a small town in Illinois—and the world was getting both bigger and smaller. When Yangzom lived in India she sent her children to boarding school in Darjeeling, the same English boarding school, oddly, that my Thai father-in-law attended. The world continued to get smaller, and I, an ambivalent Catholic from Illinois, learned more and more about Tibetan Buddhism and the beauty and resilience of the Tibetan culture. This play is dedicated to Yangzom, because a story that she told me brought it about.

Three years ago, Yangzom told me a story about Tibetan friends of hers in Boston who had a successful restaurant. One day, monks from India arrived to tell the family that their son was a reincarnated lama, or high teacher. I said, “Well, what did they do?” Yangzom said, “They closed the restaurant and moved to India to educate the child at a monastery.” Having three kids myself, I found it incomprehensible to let go of a child with any grace, even if it was for his or her own spiritual development. I wanted to write about the subject, but I felt that if there was to be dramatic conflict there had better be a white woman, or a woman not culturally raised to be a Buddhist, in the play. I was interested in exploring the dynamic between the “attachment parenting” phenomenon in certain mothering circles in the United States and a vague interest that the same set of people might have in Buddhism, which emphasizes non-attachment.

Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience—like crossing the street without holding my hand—I feel the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear—the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that, ultimately, the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw: Children are supposed to grow up and away from you, and one of you will die first.

Motherhood is a predicament. How to live fully inside it with any grace? And how to write about it?

2 Why puppets?

As I considered writing a play about a child who was a reincarnated spiritual master, I wondered how I would cast that role with a three-year-old who could memorize lines, project, and evince the spiritual authority of a seventy-year-old lama. This seemed an almost impossible task. Since three-year-olds aren’t very reliable, I decided to use a puppet. I’ve always wanted to work with puppets, and I felt that the puppet would be the clearest way to see both the child and the child’s previous life at the same time. I wanted there to be little or no doubt in the play that the child was in fact a reincarnation, so that the characters in the play, when presented with the news, could be more concerned with the question of “Now what?” rather than, to my mind, with the less interesting question of “Is he or isn’t he?”

The metaphor of the puppet and the puppeteer is meant to connect the child, or the body, with the older spirit that animates the child. I was not interested in the cliché of the puppet as an object to be manipulated. Eric Bass, a puppet-maker, says it better than I can in his wonderful essay “The Myths of Puppet Theater”:

Photograph © Abbas/Magnum Photos.

There are two myths about puppet theater that need to be exploded. The first of them...is the myth that the puppeteer controls the puppet. This myth is, of course, supported by numerous catch phrases in our language and culture: He played him like a puppet. Puppet government. All suggest that the puppeteer makes the puppet do whatever he or she wants. Although some puppeteers do try to impose their will on the objects of their art, most know that this is a disservice to both the art and the object. Our job, our art, is to bring the puppet to life. To impose control over the object is, in both spirit and practice, the opposite of this.

As puppeteers, it is, surprisingly, not our job to impose our intent on the puppet. It is our job to discover what the puppet can do and what it seems to want to do. It has propensities. We want to find out what they are, and support them. We are, in this sense, less like tyrants, and more like nurses to these objects....They seem to have destinies. We want to help them arrive at those destinies....It requires from us a generosity. If we try to dominate them, we will take from them the life we are trying to give them.

5

sarah ruhl answers f ive ques t ions 1

How did a Catholic white girl from Illinois come to write about Tibetan Buddhism?

I have three children. My first daughter, Anna, was born shortly before I did The Clean House at Lincoln Center. For eight years, we’ve had a wonderful babysitter named Yangzom. She is from Queens, by way of India, by way of Tibet. Because I often work from home, usually writing in the dining room, Yangzom and I have gotten to know each other very well.

We have shared the strange intimacy of sitting in a room together while she gave a bottle to one of my newborn twins as I breast-fed the other baby. We have administered nebulizers and Tylenol to sick children together, celebrated birthdays together, and rejoiced in first steps together.

Over the years, she has told me many stories—about life in exile in India, and what it was like to escape Tibet with the Chinese army in pursuit, her twelve-day-old daughter strapped to her back as she navigated the Himalayas. When her mother came from Nepal on her first trip to the United States, she visited our home. Yangzom knelt at her mother’s feet, as was the custom, and her mother smiled at my children, and silently prayed, for hours. I was raised in a small town in Illinois—and the world was getting both bigger and smaller. When Yangzom lived in India she sent her children to boarding school in Darjeeling, the same English boarding school, oddly, that my Thai father-in-law attended. The world continued to get smaller, and I, an ambivalent Catholic from Illinois, learned more and more about Tibetan Buddhism and the beauty and resilience of the Tibetan culture. This play is dedicated to Yangzom, because a story that she told me brought it about.

Three years ago, Yangzom told me a story about Tibetan friends of hers in Boston who had a successful restaurant. One day, monks from India arrived to tell the family that their son was a reincarnated lama, or high teacher. I said, “Well, what did they do?” Yangzom said, “They closed the restaurant and moved to India to educate the child at a monastery.” Having three kids myself, I found it incomprehensible to let go of a child with any grace, even if it was for his or her own spiritual development. I wanted to write about the subject, but I felt that if there was to be dramatic conflict there had better be a white woman, or a woman not culturally raised to be a Buddhist, in the play. I was interested in exploring the dynamic between the “attachment parenting” phenomenon in certain mothering circles in the United States and a vague interest that the same set of people might have in Buddhism, which emphasizes non-attachment.

Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience—like crossing the street without holding my hand—I feel the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear—the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that, ultimately, the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw: Children are supposed to grow up and away from you, and one of you will die first.

Motherhood is a predicament. How to live fully inside it with any grace? And how to write about it?

2 Why puppets?

As I considered writing a play about a child who was a reincarnated spiritual master, I wondered how I would cast that role with a three-year-old who could memorize lines, project, and evince the spiritual authority of a seventy-year-old lama. This seemed an almost impossible task. Since three-year-olds aren’t very reliable, I decided to use a puppet. I’ve always wanted to work with puppets, and I felt that the puppet would be the clearest way to see both the child and the child’s previous life at the same time. I wanted there to be little or no doubt in the play that the child was in fact a reincarnation, so that the characters in the play, when presented with the news, could be more concerned with the question of “Now what?” rather than, to my mind, with the less interesting question of “Is he or isn’t he?”

The metaphor of the puppet and the puppeteer is meant to connect the child, or the body, with the older spirit that animates the child. I was not interested in the cliché of the puppet as an object to be manipulated. Eric Bass, a puppet-maker, says it better than I can in his wonderful essay “The Myths of Puppet Theater”:

Photograph © Abbas/Magnum Photos.

There are two myths about puppet theater that need to be exploded. The first of them...is the myth that the puppeteer controls the puppet. This myth is, of course, supported by numerous catch phrases in our language and culture: He played him like a puppet. Puppet government. All suggest that the puppeteer makes the puppet do whatever he or she wants. Although some puppeteers do try to impose their will on the objects of their art, most know that this is a disservice to both the art and the object. Our job, our art, is to bring the puppet to life. To impose control over the object is, in both spirit and practice, the opposite of this.

As puppeteers, it is, surprisingly, not our job to impose our intent on the puppet. It is our job to discover what the puppet can do and what it seems to want to do. It has propensities. We want to find out what they are, and support them. We are, in this sense, less like tyrants, and more like nurses to these objects....They seem to have destinies. We want to help them arrive at those destinies....It requires from us a generosity. If we try to dominate them, we will take from them the life we are trying to give them.

5

the dreadful child 3 Have there ever been Western reincarnations of Tibetan lamas?

While this play is utterly a fiction, there are a handful of Tibetan lamas who have been reincarnated in the West, sometimes to white parents, or to intercultural parents. I had the good fortune to meet with one such tulku when he was all grown up. His mother was American and his father was French, and both were Tibetan Buddhists. He was recognized as a reincarnated lama at the age of three, and enthroned in a monastery in India. I asked him how his mother was able to make such a decision. He said that she was very clear in her decision, because he himself, as a three-year-old, expressed a strong desire to go to the monastery. Much of her pain came from the cultural opprobrium of other French mothers who didn’t understand her decision.

As it becomes more and more difficult to openly practice Buddhism in Tibet because of the Chinese occupation, it becomes increasingly common for high teachers to choose reincarnations outside Tibet. Tibetan Buddhists believe that while all of us are reborn, high spiritual masters are reincarnated, which means that they get to choose their new life, and often they choose a context that will be most fruitful to them in continuing their life’s work.

I was first introduced to the concept of the tulku system, in which the student searches for the reincarnation of his former teacher, by the beautiful documentary The Unmistaken Child. I was so moved by the idea that a student could find a teacher again; that the student becomes the teacher, and the teacher becomes the student, lifetime after lifetime. I have been very lucky in my own life to have had extraordinary teachers. I was comforted by the idea that I might have known them before, and might know them again.

4 How is my life different from that of a Tibetan living in Tibet?

I am free to learn and study in my own language. I can leave my country and return. I have a passport. I am a citizen of my country. I can pray without going to jail. I am not asked to denounce my God or to walk on pictures of what I consider to be sacred. My house and my church have not been summarily destroyed by an occupying nation. I can own a picture of my spiritual or secular leader without going to jail. I can write a book about my life, or tell stories of the past to my children, and not go to jail.

If I went to jail, I could get a lawyer. I would not be held indefinitely for decades by Chinese officials. I would not have my arms and feet shackled while being suspended from the ceiling. I would not have an electric prod inserted into my vagina. I would not witness the rape of nuns who have taken vows of chastity. I would not be doused with boiling water. I would not be urinated on by guards. I would not have bamboo splinters placed under my fingernails. I would be visited. I would be fed.

5 Given that my life is so very different from life in Tibet, what right have I to write Tibetan characters?

I ask myself this every day that we rehearse this play. I remind myself of what I have in common with an average mother or father living in Tibet: I love my children. I want the best for them. It hurts me when they are sick, or when I’m parted from them. I wonder what it’s like to die. I love my teachers. I miss my father. I wonder how it is that we are all connected, despite our tremendous differences.

There is a saying: The five world religions are like the five fingers of the hand, pointing to the same moon. And I wonder, along with my children, what is the moon?

Suggested Further Reading and Watching The Voice That Remembers by Ama Adhe, Across Many Mountains by Yangzom Brauen, Reborn in the West: The Reincarnation Masters by Vicki Mackenzie, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, Good Life, Good Death by Gehlek Rimpoche, Reflections on a Mountain Lake by Ani Tenzin Palmo, The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace by Mark Epstein, The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard, all the books of Lama Yeshe and Stephen Batchelor, and all the beautiful autobiographies of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, including My Land and My People, and also of the Dalai Lama’s mother, Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother’s Story, and his brother, Tibet Is My Country, by Thubten Jigme Norbu. Finally, I especially recommend the extraordinary documentary The Unmistaken Child, as well as Yangsi and My Reincarnation.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room or the vibrator play and The Clean House (both at Lincoln Center Theater), Stage Kiss, Dear Elizabeth, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Melancholy Play, Eurydice, Orlando, Late: A Cowboy Song, and a translation of Three Sisters. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and off Broadway, around the country, and internationally. They have been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the Lilly Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and a MacArthur award. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Her new book is 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write.

6

“Come here, you dreadful child,” my mother would say. Or maybe “horrible” or “hideous.” Once I was old enough to compare and contrast parenting styles, I asked my mother why my friends’ parents could express their affection without the hair-raising vituperation that she seemed to find necessary.

“They believe in kinder gods,” Mom explained. “If I were to call attention to your perfection, the gods might just decide that they have a use for you.”

In photographs, I am a pasty pudding of a child with little raisin eyes and a disgruntled expression. My father said that as an infant I looked just like Winston Churchill (but then, as the great man himself declared, babies do). No gods worth fearing would take a second look at me, but perhaps Darwinian evolution gives the edge to parents who can’t see their own baby as just another Winnie look-alike among the teeming millions.

My firstborn, Zachary, on the other hand, really was different. When my pregnancy had advanced sufficiently to be noticed, our local homeless man, taking his daily drunken stagger around the park, caught sight of my bulging stomach. Pointing, he cawed, “Lady, that child is special! He will be sacred to God!” I said, “Thank you,” went home, took my prenatal vitamins, elevated my swollen ankles, and pondered this message in my heart.

Then a neighbor appeared, bearing a bag of hand-me-downs from her own child. Tiny-footed jammies, little fuzzy socks, and endless cotton caps to protect a small, bald head from cold drafts or hot sun, all nearly new. Only the undershirts—the kind that overlap and snap in front—showed any sign of wear. Grayish-white, stained around the neckline and down the front with baby puke, they might be useful as rags, I thought. Fortunately, I didn’t say so out loud. As the original owner toddled around the apartment, mumbling gibberish (“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat”) and looking for trachea-sized objects to put into her mouth, her mother spread the T-shirts reverently across her lap. Moist-eyed, she caressed the spit-up stains that marked the fronts as if these were the stigmata on the Shroud of Turin.

“You have no idea,” she said, “how much you are going to love your baby.”

Ah. Okay, I said to myself. I get it.

If, as was no doubt the case, that homeless man prophesied the same for every pregnant woman he encountered, each would hear and ponder his message as if it were exclusively for her.

Of ordinary babies like my mother’s and mine, the educator Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote, “No angels herald their beginnings. No prophets predict their future courses. No wise men see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind.”

The conclusion that might be drawn from this is that there is no such babe in the offing, but Fahs swings the other way: “Each night a child is born is a holy night.”

Every child is special, every child is sacred, but by middle school my child (and his siblings) could have told the homeless man and Sophia Fahs, too, that “special” isn’t so good. It’s the adjective that, when applied to ordinary words (“needs,” “education,” “Olympics”) concretizes one of the pregnant parent’s most potent fears. Still, if “special” is worrisome, my mother would

by ka t e bra e s trup

point out that “sacred” is even worse. From the Buddha to the prophet Samuel, from Isaac to Jesus, those whom divine messengers (whether radiant and winged or drunk and smelly) single out may be destined for great things, but not necessarily for safety, happiness, or prosperity.

No wonder so many sacred children are said to have been conceived by a miracle, so often through an infertile woman’s bargain with the divine: Just let me have a baby, God, and you may do with him as you will. We are meant to see such prayers as evidence of simple faith, not of abject desperation, and the resulting pregnancy as a sign of God’s compassion and mercy, never mind that the resulting child and his mom seem doomed to one awful experience after another, right from the start.

Siddhartha’s mother died within twelve days of the future Buddha’s birth. The Hebrew matriarch Hannah wanted a child so badly that she agreed in advance to a custody arrangement in which her son Samuel was handed over to Eli, the priest of the temple, as soon as he was weaned. Abraham’s strange, conflicted marriage to Sarah resulted in collateral damage when Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, got dumped in the desert for Yahweh to look after, while the legitimate “special boy,” Isaac, was bound and threatened with death before his dad was belatedly served with a divine protection-from-abuse order. (Is being the progenitor of a people as numerous as stars worth a bad case of PTSD?) No wonder adult prophets from Moses to Muhammad, upon receiving recognizance from God, do their best to duck the honor.

“The most excellent jihad is the uttering of truth in the presence of an unjust ruler,” says the Hadith of Tirmidhi. Right—and such a jihad tends to be bloody, brief, and painful. Why would anyone sign himself—let alone his kids—up for that?

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I whispered, tucking my own “horrible, hideous” offspring safely into bed.

Long ago, before I was married or had children, I volunteered in the geriatric ward of a hospital in Washington, D.C. I read aloud (loudly) to those whose eyes and ears were failing, chatted with the lonesome, and gave backrubs to those who ached for touch.

Washington is a diverse city, with substantial numbers of immigrants and expatriates from all over the world. So it was not unusual for a patient’s accent to serve as our conversation starter.

One day, as I was massaging Keri lotion into her shoulders, an elderly woman began to reminisce about her happy childhood in Germany, her school days, and her time preparing for a career in scientific research at the University of Potsdam. She matriculated in 1939, she said, and her parents were very proud.

She was seated in a chair, her back turned to me, the ties of her hospital gown untied. To this day I remember the pattern of freckles on her back, the wisps of gray hair escaping from the crocheted cap she always wore, and the smell of Keri. The woman’s skin suddenly felt different to me, and perhaps my hands felt different to her, too, for she hurriedly began to speak of the cruel Allied bombings, the end of her dreams of being a scientist, the rapine and plunder Germans endured at the hands of the Red Army.

“With only the belongings we could stuff into our car, my

7

the dreadful child 3 Have there ever been Western reincarnations of Tibetan lamas?

While this play is utterly a fiction, there are a handful of Tibetan lamas who have been reincarnated in the West, sometimes to white parents, or to intercultural parents. I had the good fortune to meet with one such tulku when he was all grown up. His mother was American and his father was French, and both were Tibetan Buddhists. He was recognized as a reincarnated lama at the age of three, and enthroned in a monastery in India. I asked him how his mother was able to make such a decision. He said that she was very clear in her decision, because he himself, as a three-year-old, expressed a strong desire to go to the monastery. Much of her pain came from the cultural opprobrium of other French mothers who didn’t understand her decision.

As it becomes more and more difficult to openly practice Buddhism in Tibet because of the Chinese occupation, it becomes increasingly common for high teachers to choose reincarnations outside Tibet. Tibetan Buddhists believe that while all of us are reborn, high spiritual masters are reincarnated, which means that they get to choose their new life, and often they choose a context that will be most fruitful to them in continuing their life’s work.

I was first introduced to the concept of the tulku system, in which the student searches for the reincarnation of his former teacher, by the beautiful documentary The Unmistaken Child. I was so moved by the idea that a student could find a teacher again; that the student becomes the teacher, and the teacher becomes the student, lifetime after lifetime. I have been very lucky in my own life to have had extraordinary teachers. I was comforted by the idea that I might have known them before, and might know them again.

4 How is my life different from that of a Tibetan living in Tibet?

I am free to learn and study in my own language. I can leave my country and return. I have a passport. I am a citizen of my country. I can pray without going to jail. I am not asked to denounce my God or to walk on pictures of what I consider to be sacred. My house and my church have not been summarily destroyed by an occupying nation. I can own a picture of my spiritual or secular leader without going to jail. I can write a book about my life, or tell stories of the past to my children, and not go to jail.

If I went to jail, I could get a lawyer. I would not be held indefinitely for decades by Chinese officials. I would not have my arms and feet shackled while being suspended from the ceiling. I would not have an electric prod inserted into my vagina. I would not witness the rape of nuns who have taken vows of chastity. I would not be doused with boiling water. I would not be urinated on by guards. I would not have bamboo splinters placed under my fingernails. I would be visited. I would be fed.

5 Given that my life is so very different from life in Tibet, what right have I to write Tibetan characters?

I ask myself this every day that we rehearse this play. I remind myself of what I have in common with an average mother or father living in Tibet: I love my children. I want the best for them. It hurts me when they are sick, or when I’m parted from them. I wonder what it’s like to die. I love my teachers. I miss my father. I wonder how it is that we are all connected, despite our tremendous differences.

There is a saying: The five world religions are like the five fingers of the hand, pointing to the same moon. And I wonder, along with my children, what is the moon?

Suggested Further Reading and Watching The Voice That Remembers by Ama Adhe, Across Many Mountains by Yangzom Brauen, Reborn in the West: The Reincarnation Masters by Vicki Mackenzie, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, Good Life, Good Death by Gehlek Rimpoche, Reflections on a Mountain Lake by Ani Tenzin Palmo, The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace by Mark Epstein, The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard, all the books of Lama Yeshe and Stephen Batchelor, and all the beautiful autobiographies of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, including My Land and My People, and also of the Dalai Lama’s mother, Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother’s Story, and his brother, Tibet Is My Country, by Thubten Jigme Norbu. Finally, I especially recommend the extraordinary documentary The Unmistaken Child, as well as Yangsi and My Reincarnation.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room or the vibrator play and The Clean House (both at Lincoln Center Theater), Stage Kiss, Dear Elizabeth, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Melancholy Play, Eurydice, Orlando, Late: A Cowboy Song, and a translation of Three Sisters. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and off Broadway, around the country, and internationally. They have been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the Lilly Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and a MacArthur award. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Her new book is 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write.

6

“Come here, you dreadful child,” my mother would say. Or maybe “horrible” or “hideous.” Once I was old enough to compare and contrast parenting styles, I asked my mother why my friends’ parents could express their affection without the hair-raising vituperation that she seemed to find necessary.

“They believe in kinder gods,” Mom explained. “If I were to call attention to your perfection, the gods might just decide that they have a use for you.”

In photographs, I am a pasty pudding of a child with little raisin eyes and a disgruntled expression. My father said that as an infant I looked just like Winston Churchill (but then, as the great man himself declared, babies do). No gods worth fearing would take a second look at me, but perhaps Darwinian evolution gives the edge to parents who can’t see their own baby as just another Winnie look-alike among the teeming millions.

My firstborn, Zachary, on the other hand, really was different. When my pregnancy had advanced sufficiently to be noticed, our local homeless man, taking his daily drunken stagger around the park, caught sight of my bulging stomach. Pointing, he cawed, “Lady, that child is special! He will be sacred to God!” I said, “Thank you,” went home, took my prenatal vitamins, elevated my swollen ankles, and pondered this message in my heart.

Then a neighbor appeared, bearing a bag of hand-me-downs from her own child. Tiny-footed jammies, little fuzzy socks, and endless cotton caps to protect a small, bald head from cold drafts or hot sun, all nearly new. Only the undershirts—the kind that overlap and snap in front—showed any sign of wear. Grayish-white, stained around the neckline and down the front with baby puke, they might be useful as rags, I thought. Fortunately, I didn’t say so out loud. As the original owner toddled around the apartment, mumbling gibberish (“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat”) and looking for trachea-sized objects to put into her mouth, her mother spread the T-shirts reverently across her lap. Moist-eyed, she caressed the spit-up stains that marked the fronts as if these were the stigmata on the Shroud of Turin.

“You have no idea,” she said, “how much you are going to love your baby.”

Ah. Okay, I said to myself. I get it.

If, as was no doubt the case, that homeless man prophesied the same for every pregnant woman he encountered, each would hear and ponder his message as if it were exclusively for her.

Of ordinary babies like my mother’s and mine, the educator Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote, “No angels herald their beginnings. No prophets predict their future courses. No wise men see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind.”

The conclusion that might be drawn from this is that there is no such babe in the offing, but Fahs swings the other way: “Each night a child is born is a holy night.”

Every child is special, every child is sacred, but by middle school my child (and his siblings) could have told the homeless man and Sophia Fahs, too, that “special” isn’t so good. It’s the adjective that, when applied to ordinary words (“needs,” “education,” “Olympics”) concretizes one of the pregnant parent’s most potent fears. Still, if “special” is worrisome, my mother would

by ka t e bra e s trup

point out that “sacred” is even worse. From the Buddha to the prophet Samuel, from Isaac to Jesus, those whom divine messengers (whether radiant and winged or drunk and smelly) single out may be destined for great things, but not necessarily for safety, happiness, or prosperity.

No wonder so many sacred children are said to have been conceived by a miracle, so often through an infertile woman’s bargain with the divine: Just let me have a baby, God, and you may do with him as you will. We are meant to see such prayers as evidence of simple faith, not of abject desperation, and the resulting pregnancy as a sign of God’s compassion and mercy, never mind that the resulting child and his mom seem doomed to one awful experience after another, right from the start.

Siddhartha’s mother died within twelve days of the future Buddha’s birth. The Hebrew matriarch Hannah wanted a child so badly that she agreed in advance to a custody arrangement in which her son Samuel was handed over to Eli, the priest of the temple, as soon as he was weaned. Abraham’s strange, conflicted marriage to Sarah resulted in collateral damage when Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, got dumped in the desert for Yahweh to look after, while the legitimate “special boy,” Isaac, was bound and threatened with death before his dad was belatedly served with a divine protection-from-abuse order. (Is being the progenitor of a people as numerous as stars worth a bad case of PTSD?) No wonder adult prophets from Moses to Muhammad, upon receiving recognizance from God, do their best to duck the honor.

“The most excellent jihad is the uttering of truth in the presence of an unjust ruler,” says the Hadith of Tirmidhi. Right—and such a jihad tends to be bloody, brief, and painful. Why would anyone sign himself—let alone his kids—up for that?

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I whispered, tucking my own “horrible, hideous” offspring safely into bed.

Long ago, before I was married or had children, I volunteered in the geriatric ward of a hospital in Washington, D.C. I read aloud (loudly) to those whose eyes and ears were failing, chatted with the lonesome, and gave backrubs to those who ached for touch.

Washington is a diverse city, with substantial numbers of immigrants and expatriates from all over the world. So it was not unusual for a patient’s accent to serve as our conversation starter.

One day, as I was massaging Keri lotion into her shoulders, an elderly woman began to reminisce about her happy childhood in Germany, her school days, and her time preparing for a career in scientific research at the University of Potsdam. She matriculated in 1939, she said, and her parents were very proud.

She was seated in a chair, her back turned to me, the ties of her hospital gown untied. To this day I remember the pattern of freckles on her back, the wisps of gray hair escaping from the crocheted cap she always wore, and the smell of Keri. The woman’s skin suddenly felt different to me, and perhaps my hands felt different to her, too, for she hurriedly began to speak of the cruel Allied bombings, the end of her dreams of being a scientist, the rapine and plunder Germans endured at the hands of the Red Army.

“With only the belongings we could stuff into our car, my

7

8

for my children, too. But if my darling child was not an American college student in the year 2014 but, instead, matriculated at a German university in 1939, would I tell her to keep her head down, work the system, maybe even join the Party, that she might live and prosper?

Or would I encourage her to resist, and risk her life?

“What could we do?” my patient asked rhetorically, of the candy striper toweling the Keri lotion off her hands, tying up her hospital gown, pressing the button that would summon a nurse to put the patient back to bed.

Like my patient, Sophie Scholl was a university student in Germany during the Nazi period. Having discerned the shape and shame of the Holocaust from the evidence readily available at the time to any German citizen, Sophie, her brother Hans, and a number of like-minded friends founded the Order of the White Rose. The group’s mission was to inform ordinary Germans about the horror that was unfolding and rouse them to resistance against the Nazis.

In photographs, Sophie Scholl has a serious, determined little face that breaks into a puckish smile. Did an angel herald this girl’s beginnings, or a prophet predict her future back when she was, to any reasonable eye, just another pasty, Churchillian infant? And, if such prophesies had been made, would Sophie’s parents have humbly acceded, like the Virgin Mary (“Let it be done according to Your word”), or would they, like Siddhartha’s dad, have vowed instead to thwart divine design by any means necessary?

Photographs © Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos.

family fled to the American zone before the Russians reached our city. We were not Nazis,” she assured me. “Ordinary Germans suffered very much during the war. No one thinks about people like us.”

So I thought about ordinary Germans. Specifically, I thought about this woman’s parents, bringing up their daughter in the 1920s and ’30s. They, too, thought their offspring special, doting as she learned to toddle and talk. They took their child to the pediatrician, to the park, to church, and enrolled her in school.

Anxiously, they perused report cards with comments like “Sophie’s handwriting is much improved,” or “She needs to practice her times tables.” They washed a sweet little face, combed and braided soft hair, made lunches, read stories out loud. There were songs and picnics, suppertime, lullabies, and bedtime prayers.

Their quotidian family life had formed part of a bland backdrop as the Weimar Republic collapsed and Hitler came to power, bringing welcome prosperity, pride, and order, if at the price, merely, of the persecution of my patient’s Jewish neighbors, the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht, and then the Holocaust.

Probably there are snapshots of my patient on her first day at university, September 1939, her parents beaming beside her.

“All we want for our little girl is that she will be healthy and happy,” my patient’s mom and dad might have said. If so, they would only have been expressing the common and, indeed, definitive desire of any good parent. I wanted health and happiness

Not without trepidation should parents hope for, let alone instill, moral discernment, civil courage, and spiritual strength in their child. The path of the child who follows the will of God is hazardous. Even when it doesn’t lead to destruction, it almost certainly will lead away from the prosperity and social position that any parent may be forgiven for equating with both success and safety. Success and safety, not self-sacrifice, are what any parent wants for her child.

Out of the mouths of babes and Sophie Scholl, who inquired rhetorically, “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?” Having been caught delivering anti-Nazi leaflets, Sophie was condemned to death by a Nazi court. “Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” She was beheaded. She was nineteen years old.

Meanwhile, across the ocean hundreds of thousands of young men were volunteering or being drafted and sent to Europe to fight for the same righteous cause: Some four hundred thousand Allied soldiers would lose their lives in the defeat of Nazism. This was the war everyone’s son had to fight, even the “special” ones. My grandfather was a forty-year-old father of five when he was conscripted into the Navy, but President Roosevelt’s own son had signed on, too.

On the other hand, in 2004 none of my friends’ children were even thinking of enlisting and heading off to fight our country’s battles in Afghanistan or Iraq. Thus it did not seem unpatriotic for me to challenge my firstborn’s decision to join the United States Marines.

“Why not me, Mom?” he asked, reasonably, and I could not bring myself to reply, Because you’re special. Because you’re mine.

What was I afraid would happen to Zach? Any parent could, with minimal effort, make a list. The United States was involved in two wars, and neither was going well. So I feared death, for one thing, or serious injury. My son could lose comrades, witness horrors, be exposed to experiences that, once lived, couldn’t be unlived or even lived down. Even my minimal exposure to military history told me that war has the potential to inflict unimaginable moral injuries and maim a human spirit. And, in this war, beheading wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility....

Zach was my baby, the first one who, clad in a hand-medown onesie, had looked up at me with his little raisin eyes and smiled that first toothless, radiant, heart-stopping infant smile.

“Oh, you dreadful little baby,” I’d breathed. “You horrid boy!”

Just in case the gods were paying attention.

Military service offers young men and women a chance to participate in one of the few remaining institutions in American life in which words like “service,” “honor,” and “courage” are used without irony. This was one of the main attractions for my son, at least. Parents were invited to attend an informational meeting 9

8

for my children, too. But if my darling child was not an American college student in the year 2014 but, instead, matriculated at a German university in 1939, would I tell her to keep her head down, work the system, maybe even join the Party, that she might live and prosper?

Or would I encourage her to resist, and risk her life?

“What could we do?” my patient asked rhetorically, of the candy striper toweling the Keri lotion off her hands, tying up her hospital gown, pressing the button that would summon a nurse to put the patient back to bed.

Like my patient, Sophie Scholl was a university student in Germany during the Nazi period. Having discerned the shape and shame of the Holocaust from the evidence readily available at the time to any German citizen, Sophie, her brother Hans, and a number of like-minded friends founded the Order of the White Rose. The group’s mission was to inform ordinary Germans about the horror that was unfolding and rouse them to resistance against the Nazis.

In photographs, Sophie Scholl has a serious, determined little face that breaks into a puckish smile. Did an angel herald this girl’s beginnings, or a prophet predict her future back when she was, to any reasonable eye, just another pasty, Churchillian infant? And, if such prophesies had been made, would Sophie’s parents have humbly acceded, like the Virgin Mary (“Let it be done according to Your word”), or would they, like Siddhartha’s dad, have vowed instead to thwart divine design by any means necessary?

Photographs © Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos.

family fled to the American zone before the Russians reached our city. We were not Nazis,” she assured me. “Ordinary Germans suffered very much during the war. No one thinks about people like us.”

So I thought about ordinary Germans. Specifically, I thought about this woman’s parents, bringing up their daughter in the 1920s and ’30s. They, too, thought their offspring special, doting as she learned to toddle and talk. They took their child to the pediatrician, to the park, to church, and enrolled her in school.

Anxiously, they perused report cards with comments like “Sophie’s handwriting is much improved,” or “She needs to practice her times tables.” They washed a sweet little face, combed and braided soft hair, made lunches, read stories out loud. There were songs and picnics, suppertime, lullabies, and bedtime prayers.

Their quotidian family life had formed part of a bland backdrop as the Weimar Republic collapsed and Hitler came to power, bringing welcome prosperity, pride, and order, if at the price, merely, of the persecution of my patient’s Jewish neighbors, the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht, and then the Holocaust.

Probably there are snapshots of my patient on her first day at university, September 1939, her parents beaming beside her.

“All we want for our little girl is that she will be healthy and happy,” my patient’s mom and dad might have said. If so, they would only have been expressing the common and, indeed, definitive desire of any good parent. I wanted health and happiness

Not without trepidation should parents hope for, let alone instill, moral discernment, civil courage, and spiritual strength in their child. The path of the child who follows the will of God is hazardous. Even when it doesn’t lead to destruction, it almost certainly will lead away from the prosperity and social position that any parent may be forgiven for equating with both success and safety. Success and safety, not self-sacrifice, are what any parent wants for her child.

Out of the mouths of babes and Sophie Scholl, who inquired rhetorically, “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?” Having been caught delivering anti-Nazi leaflets, Sophie was condemned to death by a Nazi court. “Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” She was beheaded. She was nineteen years old.

Meanwhile, across the ocean hundreds of thousands of young men were volunteering or being drafted and sent to Europe to fight for the same righteous cause: Some four hundred thousand Allied soldiers would lose their lives in the defeat of Nazism. This was the war everyone’s son had to fight, even the “special” ones. My grandfather was a forty-year-old father of five when he was conscripted into the Navy, but President Roosevelt’s own son had signed on, too.

On the other hand, in 2004 none of my friends’ children were even thinking of enlisting and heading off to fight our country’s battles in Afghanistan or Iraq. Thus it did not seem unpatriotic for me to challenge my firstborn’s decision to join the United States Marines.

“Why not me, Mom?” he asked, reasonably, and I could not bring myself to reply, Because you’re special. Because you’re mine.

What was I afraid would happen to Zach? Any parent could, with minimal effort, make a list. The United States was involved in two wars, and neither was going well. So I feared death, for one thing, or serious injury. My son could lose comrades, witness horrors, be exposed to experiences that, once lived, couldn’t be unlived or even lived down. Even my minimal exposure to military history told me that war has the potential to inflict unimaginable moral injuries and maim a human spirit. And, in this war, beheading wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility....

Zach was my baby, the first one who, clad in a hand-medown onesie, had looked up at me with his little raisin eyes and smiled that first toothless, radiant, heart-stopping infant smile.

“Oh, you dreadful little baby,” I’d breathed. “You horrid boy!”

Just in case the gods were paying attention.

Military service offers young men and women a chance to participate in one of the few remaining institutions in American life in which words like “service,” “honor,” and “courage” are used without irony. This was one of the main attractions for my son, at least. Parents were invited to attend an informational meeting 9

proximate f ires offered by the area recruiting office to local would-be marines.

So I stood with other moms and dads, sharing occasional nervous remarks and wry giggles as, backs sagging into curves carved by too much time spent before a screen, our kids did their best to stand at attention. They gasped their way through maybe a half-dozen push-ups, while an impeccable, steel-spined, bona-fide Parris Island drill instructor rapped out orders.

It was the quality of the drill instructor’s voice that struck me—literally, struck me: Each word had a palpable, percussive impact, a thud beneath my sternum. Oof!

On what would we have our children spend the precious currency of their lives? Were it within my power, I would prevent the cosmos from inflicting so much as a paper cut on my children.

How long does it take a drill instructor to learn that voice? I wondered. And how much time in the presence of that voice will be required before the sweetness in my son’s soul is drummed right out of him?

“I’m not a pacifist,” I explained to the drill instructor as the informational meeting broke up. “And my father was a marine.

But my son...”

He smiled pleasantly at me.

“You see,” I said helplessly, “Zach is a very special boy.”

To his credit, the drill instructor did not laugh. Nor did he say what was true, which is that the United States Marine Corps, and, indeed, the whole of the U.S. Military, is chock-full of very special boys and girls.

“He’ll be a good marine,” the drill instructor agreed, in a friendly, normal, human voice.

If Zach had been “special” in the -needs/-Olympics/-education way, the Marines wouldn’t have taken him, but he was fine. At the advanced combat training that Zach attended after boot camp, he contracted cellulitis, a painful infection in his toe. If it didn’t respond to treatment, he told me, they might have to amputate.

Now if, at some point during the preceding eighteen years, you had told me that my son’s toe was going to be cut off, I would have been devastated. Not his adorable toe! I gave birth to that toe! But these things are, evidently, not absolute but relative.

“They might have to amputate my toe, Mom,” Zach said, and my heart leaped in hope.

Maybe if they amputate his toe they’ll have to send him home? At the very least, they surely won’t be able to send him to Iraq?

Actually, as it happens they surely would have sent him: Lose a thumb or an eye and your war is over, but nine toes are plenty, at least when the nation needs boots on the ground. So when the Navy doctors cured Zach’s cellulitis without resorting to surgery I was glad, but it remains disquieting to remember the moment in which I actually hoped that my son would be maimed.

10

The demonstration of a disability that might honorably disqualify one from self-sacrifice has echoes, too, in human mythology. Having sustained what we might call a “sports injury” in a wrestling match with the Angel of the Lord, the Hebrew patriarch Jacob limped ever afterward. But God didn’t excuse him: Jacob had to address his family’s dysfunctions and then gimp to Canaan. Upon being called by God, the young Moses tried to beg off, saying, “Please, LORD, I’m not eloquent. I talk too slowly and I have a speech impediment.” But he still found himself forced to stutter persuasively so that the Jews would depart the fleshpots of Egypt. According to Islamic tradition, when the impeccable, steel-spined angel Gabriel commanded Muhammad to recite, Muhammad did not crisply respond, Sir, yes sir!

“I can’t,” he said, instead.

“In the name of the Lord and Cherisher, Who created man out of a clot of congealed blood,” Gabriel declared, the illiterate Muhammad would stop whinging, step up, and write the Koran.

On what would we have our children spend the precious currency of their lives? Were it within my power, I would prevent the cosmos from inflicting so much as a paper cut on my children or yours. Indeed, the work of love and justice to which all of us—the kids, too—are called is aimed at making all sorts of injuries (hunger, cancer, genocide) less common, and then even less common.

If no wise ones were guided by a star to the place where little Sophie Scholl was born, the reason is simple: That baby girl wasn’t going to save humankind, not by herself, anyway. The salvation of the world can only be a continuing, collective effort, beset by ambiguities and uncertainties, demanding suffering and sacrifice from any or all of us, including our children. Zach understood this, far better than I, which is why he joined the Marines. Through him, I learned that the United States Marine Corps undertakes all manner of humanitarian missions, even in time of war, and it was to these that my son, by luck alone, happened to be deployed. He never was sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, though he had friends who went. At the conclusion of this service to his country, Zach immediately began to search for other ways to make love and justice manifest in the world. That’s who he is. So it’s tempting for his mother to say, “You see? The homeless prophet was objectively correct: My son is special....” But no: Any angelic annunciation to a pregnant woman stands an excellent chance of proving accurate, for every mother’s son and daughter will, one fine, sunny, unpredicted day, have to decide for themselves whom they will awaken, what action they might stir, and why their human life, and any life, is worthy of its being.

Kate Braestrup, the author of the New York Times best-seller Here if You Need Me, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, Beginner’s Grace, and the forthcoming Anchor and Flares, serves as chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, accompanying search-and-rescue missions in the Maine woods. She lives in Maine with her husband, the artist Simon van der Ven.

The first two days, I was convinced that the flames wouldn’t reach us. The fires seemed contained in the valleys a good distance away.

I told my sons that they could stay in the pool. The ash filming over the water wouldn’t harm them. We’d just wash it out of their hair. We’d just pick it out of their teeth.

Over dinner, we discussed what pink or brown would best describe the smoke muting the sunset. The next morning we discussed the haze pinking the air over the road outside the ranch, as the fires had now rolled closer.

From the back windows on the second floor, depending on the wind, we could glimpse the flames unfurling at the center.

This raging brushfire occurred in Chile while we were visiting my husband’s family there. The ranch belonged to my sister-inlaw, Victoria, who called every few hours for an update on her house. Each year she lends us the ranch during our annual pilgrimage to see my husband’s many relatives and eat the magnificent plums and apricots off his sister’s trees. The ranch sits on a hilltop above the Aconcagua Valley, famous for its nonstop sunny days. It is an excellent place for cultivating avocados and tomatoes, but all the sun and the little rainfall make it vulnerable to drought and therefore to the whims of pyromaniacs, who find the quickto-ignite brush covering the surrounding valleys irresistible. I’d seen the smoke of their labors before, but never so close to Victoria’s ranch that the ash had coated the leaves on the fruit trees. It was now also floating thickly over the water in the dog’s bowl, a street mutt that my nieces had adopted and named Jack Nicholson.

Each night, after I put my sons to bed, I would sit with Jack Nicholson and worry.

We’d either be lucky or we wouldn’t be. It wasn’t a particularly reassuring thought, as thoughts about luck rarely are. Even the origin of the concept of luck is unreliable.

The word can be traced to the early Dutch geluk, but where “luck” came from before that is unknown.

As I watched the smoke billow over the plum trees, hoping for something as origin-less as luck did not seem like much of a plan. It was about as helpful as brooding on the widening hole in the ozone layer over Chile and the increasingly extreme weather I’d been complicit in creating for my children—all the bottles of water I bought, all the smog I’d made with my driving ways.

Sure, I abided by my sister-in-law’s rule of collecting all the dishwater in buckets and dumping it on the plants to save water. We

reused our towels in order to run the washer less often. Yet the increasing drought in the valley was so much larger than anything these daily efforts could allay.

As for the current fire headed toward us, we’d spoken to the local fire department and had been told that there was nothing to do but wait it out. The firemen had our number, and if we needed to evacuate the ranch they’d call. And they hadn’t called.

In the meantime, relatives kept arriving to kiss my sons and give them toy phones and trucks and joke about the way they rolled their r’s in Spanish, like their American mother. They joked in this same good-natured way about the fires and the ash peppering the salads on the picnic table. None of them seemed to think that any action needed to be taken yet, so who was I to say otherwise?

It wasn’t my country. It wasn’t my house.

Soon, however, the fires began having their way with an avocado orchard less than a kilometer to the north. Victoria’s questions on the phone became more panicky.

There was talk of hosing down the roof before we went to bed. There were more calls to the firemen of Limache, who, I learned, were mostly volunteers.

To maintain my stupor of false calm, I recited a little Longfellow to my sons at bedtime. O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned! I read as they shouted over me about the apocalyptically brown clouds outside the window.

I read on regardless. I would be lucky and they’d remember this Longfellow moment along with the haze, or they wouldn’t.

There is so much luck to consider when you’re putting your children to bed with a fire that either is or isn’t rolling closer.

That night, I asked my husband if he thought we should pack suitcases just in case we had to leave during the night. He said he’d ask the neighbors when he met up with them that evening. After dark, delegates from each of the houses along the hilltop gathered on the road to conjecture about what to do next. My husband had encouraged me to join him at these gatherings, as there was an uncle on the ranch to stay with our sleeping children. But I didn’t go. I preferred to stick to my standard method for averting anxiety: the longest available couch and a book.

I got so engrossed in what I was reading that I didn’t realize two hours had passed until my husband called, speaking so quickly

by idra n ovey

in Spanish I could barely follow. The winds had picked up and were now blowing the fires faster across the valley. The firemen still didn’t think the flames would reach us, but I could hear in my husband’s voice that he, too, was losing confidence in these assurances. He said he’d call in half an hour with an update, and we’d decide what to do.

In the minutes that followed, I felt eminently American, and alone. I went to check on my sleeping sons, but that only filled ninety-two seconds. I longed for a news channel to give me an excess of information to confirm that my panic was appropriate.

I wanted to read updates from other panicking acquaintances on social media. But there was no Internet on the ranch, and no TV. There were only neighbors, whom I’d elected not to meet.

Stuck with my own company, I tried to focus again on the poet George Oppen’s notebooks, which I’d been reading when my husband called. One does what he is most moved to do, Oppen wrote. But what if one is not moving at all? What if one worries about climate change and worsening droughts, but one occasionally takes a long shower anyway, knowing full well there is a brushfire burning its way toward one’s house?

A little after midnight, my husband came home and said the flames seemed to have stopped advancing. I asked what he meant by “seemed.” He said that was the word the volunteer firemen used when they told everyone that they might as well go to sleep.

They were going to call if we needed to wake our children and evacuate.

But weren’t these firemen mostly volunteers? I asked him. What if they were wrong and the fire suddenly picked up again? What sort of parent could sleep with that kind of uncertainty?

Lots of parents, it turned out, including me.

By the following morning, the fires were mostly smoke. The next day, all that was left of them was a collection of ashy spots where the avocado trees had been.

For all the groundwater our species drew up from the wells of the Aconcagua Valley, we’d gotten lucky again.

Idra Novey is the author of the novel Ways to Disappear, forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2015. Her poetry collection Exit, Civilian was selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series.

She teaches in the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University.

11

proximate f ires offered by the area recruiting office to local would-be marines.

So I stood with other moms and dads, sharing occasional nervous remarks and wry giggles as, backs sagging into curves carved by too much time spent before a screen, our kids did their best to stand at attention. They gasped their way through maybe a half-dozen push-ups, while an impeccable, steel-spined, bona-fide Parris Island drill instructor rapped out orders.

It was the quality of the drill instructor’s voice that struck me—literally, struck me: Each word had a palpable, percussive impact, a thud beneath my sternum. Oof!

On what would we have our children spend the precious currency of their lives? Were it within my power, I would prevent the cosmos from inflicting so much as a paper cut on my children.

How long does it take a drill instructor to learn that voice? I wondered. And how much time in the presence of that voice will be required before the sweetness in my son’s soul is drummed right out of him?

“I’m not a pacifist,” I explained to the drill instructor as the informational meeting broke up. “And my father was a marine.

But my son...”

He smiled pleasantly at me.

“You see,” I said helplessly, “Zach is a very special boy.”

To his credit, the drill instructor did not laugh. Nor did he say what was true, which is that the United States Marine Corps, and, indeed, the whole of the U.S. Military, is chock-full of very special boys and girls.

“He’ll be a good marine,” the drill instructor agreed, in a friendly, normal, human voice.

If Zach had been “special” in the -needs/-Olympics/-education way, the Marines wouldn’t have taken him, but he was fine. At the advanced combat training that Zach attended after boot camp, he contracted cellulitis, a painful infection in his toe. If it didn’t respond to treatment, he told me, they might have to amputate.

Now if, at some point during the preceding eighteen years, you had told me that my son’s toe was going to be cut off, I would have been devastated. Not his adorable toe! I gave birth to that toe! But these things are, evidently, not absolute but relative.

“They might have to amputate my toe, Mom,” Zach said, and my heart leaped in hope.

Maybe if they amputate his toe they’ll have to send him home? At the very least, they surely won’t be able to send him to Iraq?

Actually, as it happens they surely would have sent him: Lose a thumb or an eye and your war is over, but nine toes are plenty, at least when the nation needs boots on the ground. So when the Navy doctors cured Zach’s cellulitis without resorting to surgery I was glad, but it remains disquieting to remember the moment in which I actually hoped that my son would be maimed.

10

The demonstration of a disability that might honorably disqualify one from self-sacrifice has echoes, too, in human mythology. Having sustained what we might call a “sports injury” in a wrestling match with the Angel of the Lord, the Hebrew patriarch Jacob limped ever afterward. But God didn’t excuse him: Jacob had to address his family’s dysfunctions and then gimp to Canaan. Upon being called by God, the young Moses tried to beg off, saying, “Please, LORD, I’m not eloquent. I talk too slowly and I have a speech impediment.” But he still found himself forced to stutter persuasively so that the Jews would depart the fleshpots of Egypt. According to Islamic tradition, when the impeccable, steel-spined angel Gabriel commanded Muhammad to recite, Muhammad did not crisply respond, Sir, yes sir!

“I can’t,” he said, instead.

“In the name of the Lord and Cherisher, Who created man out of a clot of congealed blood,” Gabriel declared, the illiterate Muhammad would stop whinging, step up, and write the Koran.

On what would we have our children spend the precious currency of their lives? Were it within my power, I would prevent the cosmos from inflicting so much as a paper cut on my children or yours. Indeed, the work of love and justice to which all of us—the kids, too—are called is aimed at making all sorts of injuries (hunger, cancer, genocide) less common, and then even less common.

If no wise ones were guided by a star to the place where little Sophie Scholl was born, the reason is simple: That baby girl wasn’t going to save humankind, not by herself, anyway. The salvation of the world can only be a continuing, collective effort, beset by ambiguities and uncertainties, demanding suffering and sacrifice from any or all of us, including our children. Zach understood this, far better than I, which is why he joined the Marines. Through him, I learned that the United States Marine Corps undertakes all manner of humanitarian missions, even in time of war, and it was to these that my son, by luck alone, happened to be deployed. He never was sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, though he had friends who went. At the conclusion of this service to his country, Zach immediately began to search for other ways to make love and justice manifest in the world. That’s who he is. So it’s tempting for his mother to say, “You see? The homeless prophet was objectively correct: My son is special....” But no: Any angelic annunciation to a pregnant woman stands an excellent chance of proving accurate, for every mother’s son and daughter will, one fine, sunny, unpredicted day, have to decide for themselves whom they will awaken, what action they might stir, and why their human life, and any life, is worthy of its being.

Kate Braestrup, the author of the New York Times best-seller Here if You Need Me, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, Beginner’s Grace, and the forthcoming Anchor and Flares, serves as chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, accompanying search-and-rescue missions in the Maine woods. She lives in Maine with her husband, the artist Simon van der Ven.

The first two days, I was convinced that the flames wouldn’t reach us. The fires seemed contained in the valleys a good distance away.

I told my sons that they could stay in the pool. The ash filming over the water wouldn’t harm them. We’d just wash it out of their hair. We’d just pick it out of their teeth.

Over dinner, we discussed what pink or brown would best describe the smoke muting the sunset. The next morning we discussed the haze pinking the air over the road outside the ranch, as the fires had now rolled closer.

From the back windows on the second floor, depending on the wind, we could glimpse the flames unfurling at the center.

This raging brushfire occurred in Chile while we were visiting my husband’s family there. The ranch belonged to my sister-inlaw, Victoria, who called every few hours for an update on her house. Each year she lends us the ranch during our annual pilgrimage to see my husband’s many relatives and eat the magnificent plums and apricots off his sister’s trees. The ranch sits on a hilltop above the Aconcagua Valley, famous for its nonstop sunny days. It is an excellent place for cultivating avocados and tomatoes, but all the sun and the little rainfall make it vulnerable to drought and therefore to the whims of pyromaniacs, who find the quickto-ignite brush covering the surrounding valleys irresistible. I’d seen the smoke of their labors before, but never so close to Victoria’s ranch that the ash had coated the leaves on the fruit trees. It was now also floating thickly over the water in the dog’s bowl, a street mutt that my nieces had adopted and named Jack Nicholson.

Each night, after I put my sons to bed, I would sit with Jack Nicholson and worry.

We’d either be lucky or we wouldn’t be. It wasn’t a particularly reassuring thought, as thoughts about luck rarely are. Even the origin of the concept of luck is unreliable.

The word can be traced to the early Dutch geluk, but where “luck” came from before that is unknown.

As I watched the smoke billow over the plum trees, hoping for something as origin-less as luck did not seem like much of a plan. It was about as helpful as brooding on the widening hole in the ozone layer over Chile and the increasingly extreme weather I’d been complicit in creating for my children—all the bottles of water I bought, all the smog I’d made with my driving ways.

Sure, I abided by my sister-in-law’s rule of collecting all the dishwater in buckets and dumping it on the plants to save water. We

reused our towels in order to run the washer less often. Yet the increasing drought in the valley was so much larger than anything these daily efforts could allay.

As for the current fire headed toward us, we’d spoken to the local fire department and had been told that there was nothing to do but wait it out. The firemen had our number, and if we needed to evacuate the ranch they’d call. And they hadn’t called.

In the meantime, relatives kept arriving to kiss my sons and give them toy phones and trucks and joke about the way they rolled their r’s in Spanish, like their American mother. They joked in this same good-natured way about the fires and the ash peppering the salads on the picnic table. None of them seemed to think that any action needed to be taken yet, so who was I to say otherwise?

It wasn’t my country. It wasn’t my house.

Soon, however, the fires began having their way with an avocado orchard less than a kilometer to the north. Victoria’s questions on the phone became more panicky.

There was talk of hosing down the roof before we went to bed. There were more calls to the firemen of Limache, who, I learned, were mostly volunteers.

To maintain my stupor of false calm, I recited a little Longfellow to my sons at bedtime. O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned! I read as they shouted over me about the apocalyptically brown clouds outside the window.

I read on regardless. I would be lucky and they’d remember this Longfellow moment along with the haze, or they wouldn’t.

There is so much luck to consider when you’re putting your children to bed with a fire that either is or isn’t rolling closer.

That night, I asked my husband if he thought we should pack suitcases just in case we had to leave during the night. He said he’d ask the neighbors when he met up with them that evening. After dark, delegates from each of the houses along the hilltop gathered on the road to conjecture about what to do next. My husband had encouraged me to join him at these gatherings, as there was an uncle on the ranch to stay with our sleeping children. But I didn’t go. I preferred to stick to my standard method for averting anxiety: the longest available couch and a book.

I got so engrossed in what I was reading that I didn’t realize two hours had passed until my husband called, speaking so quickly

by idra n ovey

in Spanish I could barely follow. The winds had picked up and were now blowing the fires faster across the valley. The firemen still didn’t think the flames would reach us, but I could hear in my husband’s voice that he, too, was losing confidence in these assurances. He said he’d call in half an hour with an update, and we’d decide what to do.

In the minutes that followed, I felt eminently American, and alone. I went to check on my sleeping sons, but that only filled ninety-two seconds. I longed for a news channel to give me an excess of information to confirm that my panic was appropriate.

I wanted to read updates from other panicking acquaintances on social media. But there was no Internet on the ranch, and no TV. There were only neighbors, whom I’d elected not to meet.

Stuck with my own company, I tried to focus again on the poet George Oppen’s notebooks, which I’d been reading when my husband called. One does what he is most moved to do, Oppen wrote. But what if one is not moving at all? What if one worries about climate change and worsening droughts, but one occasionally takes a long shower anyway, knowing full well there is a brushfire burning its way toward one’s house?

A little after midnight, my husband came home and said the flames seemed to have stopped advancing. I asked what he meant by “seemed.” He said that was the word the volunteer firemen used when they told everyone that they might as well go to sleep.

They were going to call if we needed to wake our children and evacuate.

But weren’t these firemen mostly volunteers? I asked him. What if they were wrong and the fire suddenly picked up again? What sort of parent could sleep with that kind of uncertainty?

Lots of parents, it turned out, including me.

By the following morning, the fires were mostly smoke. The next day, all that was left of them was a collection of ashy spots where the avocado trees had been.

For all the groundwater our species drew up from the wells of the Aconcagua Valley, we’d gotten lucky again.

Idra Novey is the author of the novel Ways to Disappear, forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2015. Her poetry collection Exit, Civilian was selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series.

She teaches in the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University.

11

the f if t ieth day: an inter view with laur ie anderson This summer at the Standard Hotel, our co-executive editor, John Guare, sat down with Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, composer, and musician, known for her albums, including Big Science, and numerous works of art that have appeared around the world. Their conversation spanned meditation, joy, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and how she approached the death of her husband, Lou Reed.

© Josef Hoflehner/ Courtesy, Benrubi Gallery, New York.

John Guare: What religion were you brought up in?

Laurie Anderson: Southern Baptist, because my grandmother was a missionary.

She went to Japan. She was a Holy Roller, a hymn-singing “you’re going to go to hell unless you have total immersion” Baptist.

And on the other side was the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant Church, which was basically a coffee church. It was about “Let’s talk about how we should be good to other people and be kind and not ruffle any feathers. And now let’s go and have coffee down in the Fellowship Room.”

JG: Why was that not enough to sustain you throughout life?

LA: Coffee sustains me. (Laughter) Well, because, like every thirteen-year-old girl, I realized that adults were idiots and they didn’t know anything, and so I rejected both of those sides of my life. Then art became my religion for quite a while. Making beautiful things became the meaning of my life, and, to some extent, it’s still my religion, although it leaves some glaring gaps.

JG: Which are?

LA: Death, first of all. I’m not interested in my own artistic legacy. I suppose that’s one way an artist would look at death: “Well, I’ll live on in my work.” That’s fine, but that’s not really my interest in looking at the immediacy of death.

I’m also really fascinated by energy systems. I’m a student of Tai Chi and Buddhism, and those are the things that probably give my life meaning more than anything else at this moment.

JG: Who led you to Buddhism?

LA: Bob Bielecki, a collaborator I work with, told me in 1977 that he had gone to a place in western Massachusetts, which turned out to be Barre, and did a ten-day silent meditation. He said that, after this ten-day si-

lent meditation of eighteen hours a day, he was able to focus on things really well and that his mind was like a beam. All the chatter had stopped. And I thought, I want a mind like a beam. I don’t want to hear the chatter.

This is in 1978. So I went there and I studied vipassana. This is a form of Buddhism that’s five hundred years old, from Thailand. It’s based on the storage of pain, and the first thing they told me was, “You’re in pain.” And I said, “I’m not in pain.” They said, “You’re in pain.” I said, “I’m here to focus. I want a mind like a beam.” I was, like, is this a good way to start, with an argument? (Laughter) I don’t think so. But gradually I understood what they were talking about.

The way vipassana works is very physical. Every time something happens to you and you don’t scream, you put it somewhere. And then you learn an incredible thing, which is you have coded pain in your body in a way that is so subtle, but as soon as you understand what it is you go, “Oh, my God. Look at this.” Every time I felt loneliness, it went to my right shoulder.

Every time I felt jealousy, it went to my ribs.

You begin to direct pain so that it will live in certain parts of your body. And the point of vipassana—like psychoanalysis, which retrieves pain through language—is that it retrieves pain through your body, and you use your kundalini energy to push it out.

When I understood that, it was frightening, because it changed my life.

My other attraction to Buddhism was the practice. The teacher said, “Some of you will go back home and you will no longer be meditating for eighteen hours.” And we’re, like, “No, no, we will!” Then he said, “Some will meditate for only eight hours a day. Some of you only four. Some of you only twenty minutes. Some of you nine. But next time you do it you’ll get a little farther, and then you’ll forget again. And then you’ll go a little farther and then you’ll forget again.” It was the first time I ran into a religion in which there was a really human dynamic. It wasn’t judgmental. It was the way people really are.

JG: Tell me about the bardo. When your husband, Lou Reed, died you said you marked the end of the bardo with a festive musical gath-

ering onstage at the Apollo. What, exactly, is a bardo?

LA: The bardo is a complicated series of events that happen over a forty-nine-day period.

When our dog, Lolabelle, the piano-playing rat terrier, died a couple of years ago, we got very interested in reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. She was like a family member to us, so we thought about the process of dying a lot. We were upset by the speeches that vets like to give that go something like “We just give her a shot, she falls asleep, we give her another shot, she falls...” And I said to our vet, “I know you want to give the speech and you’ve rehearsed the speech, but don’t give me the speech about the shots that put them to sleep. I don’t want to get hit over the head with a brick.” Animals are like people, in the sense that they approach death, they back away, they get a little closer, they back away again. And to take that experience away from another creature seems to me unconscionable. So we spent many days with our dog as she died. We lay on either side of her, and we both watched her die. It was one of the greatest experiences of our lives. It was very inspiring. I’m not comparing our dog to Lou, but I learned a lot about growing old from our dog. She just got slower and did things in a very casual way; it was very beautiful.

JG: Does the forty-nine-day period have any significance within Buddhism?

LA: That’s a really good question. I found that it was an amazing time to absorb some important things about that person’s life.

The idea is that in that period the mind of the deceased dissolves as the Tibetans grieve and the energy, or life force, prepares to enter another life-form. That made a lot of sense to us, as much as anything else. As meditators, we were interested in making a passage that was really positive, hence the musical event at the Apollo. During those forty-nine days there’s no crying, because that might beckon the soul back. That alone changes the process enormously. In my experience, a lot of mourning is more about guilt—I should’ve called her, I should’ve said something—than about the person who is dead. This is a way of focusing on that person.

13

the f if t ieth day: an inter view with laur ie anderson This summer at the Standard Hotel, our co-executive editor, John Guare, sat down with Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, composer, and musician, known for her albums, including Big Science, and numerous works of art that have appeared around the world. Their conversation spanned meditation, joy, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and how she approached the death of her husband, Lou Reed.

© Josef Hoflehner/ Courtesy, Benrubi Gallery, New York.

John Guare: What religion were you brought up in?

Laurie Anderson: Southern Baptist, because my grandmother was a missionary.

She went to Japan. She was a Holy Roller, a hymn-singing “you’re going to go to hell unless you have total immersion” Baptist.

And on the other side was the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant Church, which was basically a coffee church. It was about “Let’s talk about how we should be good to other people and be kind and not ruffle any feathers. And now let’s go and have coffee down in the Fellowship Room.”

JG: Why was that not enough to sustain you throughout life?

LA: Coffee sustains me. (Laughter) Well, because, like every thirteen-year-old girl, I realized that adults were idiots and they didn’t know anything, and so I rejected both of those sides of my life. Then art became my religion for quite a while. Making beautiful things became the meaning of my life, and, to some extent, it’s still my religion, although it leaves some glaring gaps.

JG: Which are?

LA: Death, first of all. I’m not interested in my own artistic legacy. I suppose that’s one way an artist would look at death: “Well, I’ll live on in my work.” That’s fine, but that’s not really my interest in looking at the immediacy of death.

I’m also really fascinated by energy systems. I’m a student of Tai Chi and Buddhism, and those are the things that probably give my life meaning more than anything else at this moment.

JG: Who led you to Buddhism?

LA: Bob Bielecki, a collaborator I work with, told me in 1977 that he had gone to a place in western Massachusetts, which turned out to be Barre, and did a ten-day silent meditation. He said that, after this ten-day si-

lent meditation of eighteen hours a day, he was able to focus on things really well and that his mind was like a beam. All the chatter had stopped. And I thought, I want a mind like a beam. I don’t want to hear the chatter.

This is in 1978. So I went there and I studied vipassana. This is a form of Buddhism that’s five hundred years old, from Thailand. It’s based on the storage of pain, and the first thing they told me was, “You’re in pain.” And I said, “I’m not in pain.” They said, “You’re in pain.” I said, “I’m here to focus. I want a mind like a beam.” I was, like, is this a good way to start, with an argument? (Laughter) I don’t think so. But gradually I understood what they were talking about.

The way vipassana works is very physical. Every time something happens to you and you don’t scream, you put it somewhere. And then you learn an incredible thing, which is you have coded pain in your body in a way that is so subtle, but as soon as you understand what it is you go, “Oh, my God. Look at this.” Every time I felt loneliness, it went to my right shoulder.

Every time I felt jealousy, it went to my ribs.

You begin to direct pain so that it will live in certain parts of your body. And the point of vipassana—like psychoanalysis, which retrieves pain through language—is that it retrieves pain through your body, and you use your kundalini energy to push it out.

When I understood that, it was frightening, because it changed my life.

My other attraction to Buddhism was the practice. The teacher said, “Some of you will go back home and you will no longer be meditating for eighteen hours.” And we’re, like, “No, no, we will!” Then he said, “Some will meditate for only eight hours a day. Some of you only four. Some of you only twenty minutes. Some of you nine. But next time you do it you’ll get a little farther, and then you’ll forget again. And then you’ll go a little farther and then you’ll forget again.” It was the first time I ran into a religion in which there was a really human dynamic. It wasn’t judgmental. It was the way people really are.

JG: Tell me about the bardo. When your husband, Lou Reed, died you said you marked the end of the bardo with a festive musical gath-

ering onstage at the Apollo. What, exactly, is a bardo?

LA: The bardo is a complicated series of events that happen over a forty-nine-day period.

When our dog, Lolabelle, the piano-playing rat terrier, died a couple of years ago, we got very interested in reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. She was like a family member to us, so we thought about the process of dying a lot. We were upset by the speeches that vets like to give that go something like “We just give her a shot, she falls asleep, we give her another shot, she falls...” And I said to our vet, “I know you want to give the speech and you’ve rehearsed the speech, but don’t give me the speech about the shots that put them to sleep. I don’t want to get hit over the head with a brick.” Animals are like people, in the sense that they approach death, they back away, they get a little closer, they back away again. And to take that experience away from another creature seems to me unconscionable. So we spent many days with our dog as she died. We lay on either side of her, and we both watched her die. It was one of the greatest experiences of our lives. It was very inspiring. I’m not comparing our dog to Lou, but I learned a lot about growing old from our dog. She just got slower and did things in a very casual way; it was very beautiful.

JG: Does the forty-nine-day period have any significance within Buddhism?

LA: That’s a really good question. I found that it was an amazing time to absorb some important things about that person’s life.

The idea is that in that period the mind of the deceased dissolves as the Tibetans grieve and the energy, or life force, prepares to enter another life-form. That made a lot of sense to us, as much as anything else. As meditators, we were interested in making a passage that was really positive, hence the musical event at the Apollo. During those forty-nine days there’s no crying, because that might beckon the soul back. That alone changes the process enormously. In my experience, a lot of mourning is more about guilt—I should’ve called her, I should’ve said something—than about the person who is dead. This is a way of focusing on that person.

13

Then art became my religion for quite a while. Making beautiful things became the meaning of my life, and, to some extent, it’s still my religion, although it leaves some glaring gaps.

14

of the practices is that you have him in your heart. That’s very important.

JG: Was there a specific practice that Mingyur Rinpoche had you do that helped prepare you for Lou’s death?

LA: He would always say, “Try to practice how to feel sad without being sad.” I found that especially challenging. It is kind of like if a dancer does Tai Chi—they can do all the moves perfectly, but you can tell when someone is dancing Tai Chi and when someone is doing Tai Chi. It comes from a different place. Anyway, trying to feel sad without being sad was a practice that Lou and I did often. One of the things that were also part of this particular kind of Buddhism that we were studying was the concept of the bardo. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the dissolution of the mind as it changes, over those forty-nine days, into another life-form.

JG: Prepared for rebirth. Which might be a tree or a rock? Or a double-A battery?

LA: I’m not sure about batteries, though maybe, because they are energy. That’s a really good question that I’m sure the Dalai Lama could have a lot of fun with. There were some artificial plants where he was doing a discussion one day, and somebody asked, “Why have artificial plants?” And he said, “They’re wonderful—they remind you of the real ones.” So reminding yourself through different things is the point of not having everything perfect, because there is no such thing.

JG: Is it possible that grief could call a spirit back?

LA: A lot of people have written about that idea. There’s even a classic Buddhist story about two monks who are walking along.

They are forbidden to touch women, and they get to a river and a woman is there and really needs to cross. It was sort of a desperate situation. So the older monk picks her up, carries her across, and puts her down.

Then they begin walking again. The monks walk for five more miles, and the younger monk says, “It’s really been making me crazy that you just touched that woman. We’re not supposed to touch women. How could you do that? And the older monk says, “Well, I put her down back by the river. You’ve been carrying her for the last five miles.”

JG: Sarah Ruhl’s play is, on one level, about coming to terms with loss. This concept seems

to be at the heart of Buddhist philosophy.

LA: In Buddhism there is the belief that life is suffering. You look at the origin of suffering. You look at the path out of suffering. What I found so inspiring about that teaching is that even though its basis is not looking for happiness, even though it starts with the idea that life is suffering, it is about joy and happiness.

JG: You recently said something that so startled me: that very few people write about the hallucinatory joy you feel when you lose a loved one.

LA: I was not particularly prepared for Lou’s death, even though I sort of thought I was.

I was not prepared for the completeness of the experience. When you lose your partner, you lose your witness. And that relationship is so completely gone that there’s no holding on to it.

JG: How do you find the joy?

LA: The joy finds you. It just comes into you. It invades you. I was filled with a lot of energy.

Lou’s Tai Chi teacher created a five-minute series of martial arts for him. Basically, it is a ritual in which you can actually draw energy from the earth toward yourself. They are really beautiful and fierce moves. Once, I asked Lou what one of the moves was. And he goes, “Well, that’s decapitation.” (Laughter) I practice twice a week, so I have contact with that joy two times a week. I trust my body.

JG: The subtitle of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is The Great Liberation Through Hearing. Why does it focus on hearing as the great liberation?

LA: Well, as teaching, of course, but, also, hearing is considered a very important sense, because it’s the last sense to go when you die. The book is very focused on how the body shuts down, and in what order. Your eyes go dark. Your brain flatlines. Your heart stops. But your ear hammers are still working. It describes this period of time in which you are quite confused. I’ve been in the room when people have died, and I had the feeling that that’s what’s going on.

There’s a sense of confusion as the energy is zipping around. I consider the act of dying to be just as absolutely important as being born. It’s a part of the cycle.

JG: Is there a central consciousness that evolves, or is it fluid?

LA: I think that energy is continuous. I always felt that, even as a kid. I was a sky

© Josef Hoflehner/ Courtesy, Benrubi Gallery, New York.

JG: Would a bardo apply to Lolabelle?

LA: To all beings. It applies to a fly. It applies to an enlightened being. There’s no real hierarchy—well, no, I take that back.

There’s a hierarchy, because we are moving slowly, in my opinion, toward complexity.

JG: That would astonish me. I always thought that things, as they evolved, became simpler.

LA: Well, that’s just my personal belief.

JG: Is there a celebration at the end of the bardo?

LA: I added the fiftieth day, which was the day of the Apollo, as this kind of liberation moment. What we did when Lou died was every Sunday for seven weeks we met with different groups of people to celebrate different aspects of his life. I just invited them over and people would come by and talk about one group of things that he did. There was one day on design—he designed glasses and briefcases and guitars and sound equipment. He was a real wirehead; he really knew equipment and loved it, and design, and clothes. Another Sunday was photography and film, because he had made some films and he was a wonderful photographer who knew all about cameras.

JG: You wrote about Lou’s death and what a remarkable experience it was.

LA: It was—it was a conscious experience.

He was conscious until the moment his heart stopped. Fully conscious.

JG: How long before he died did he know that he was dying?

LA: Well, in a certain way twenty minutes, and in another way he had been sick for two years. But we never accepted that he was going to succumb to this. It was a very positive, very aggressive, very hopeful situation. For many months we were prepared— with our suitcases packed and being twenty minutes from an airport—to go and have a liver transplant. That was our life. Once he got the transplant, it seemed like he would be ninety-three, just the way his mother was. He was really strong, a Tai Chi master and a health-conscious person.

JG: Did you and Lou have a guide who took you through Lou’s dying?

LA: Our teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, is on a three-year retreat and he’s in a cave somewhere. We don’t know where he is.

JG: So you had no one to talk to?

LA: Well, when you have a teacher it’s wonderful to have him physically there, but one

Then art became my religion for quite a while. Making beautiful things became the meaning of my life, and, to some extent, it’s still my religion, although it leaves some glaring gaps.

14

of the practices is that you have him in your heart. That’s very important.

JG: Was there a specific practice that Mingyur Rinpoche had you do that helped prepare you for Lou’s death?

LA: He would always say, “Try to practice how to feel sad without being sad.” I found that especially challenging. It is kind of like if a dancer does Tai Chi—they can do all the moves perfectly, but you can tell when someone is dancing Tai Chi and when someone is doing Tai Chi. It comes from a different place. Anyway, trying to feel sad without being sad was a practice that Lou and I did often. One of the things that were also part of this particular kind of Buddhism that we were studying was the concept of the bardo. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the dissolution of the mind as it changes, over those forty-nine days, into another life-form.

JG: Prepared for rebirth. Which might be a tree or a rock? Or a double-A battery?

LA: I’m not sure about batteries, though maybe, because they are energy. That’s a really good question that I’m sure the Dalai Lama could have a lot of fun with. There were some artificial plants where he was doing a discussion one day, and somebody asked, “Why have artificial plants?” And he said, “They’re wonderful—they remind you of the real ones.” So reminding yourself through different things is the point of not having everything perfect, because there is no such thing.

JG: Is it possible that grief could call a spirit back?

LA: A lot of people have written about that idea. There’s even a classic Buddhist story about two monks who are walking along.

They are forbidden to touch women, and they get to a river and a woman is there and really needs to cross. It was sort of a desperate situation. So the older monk picks her up, carries her across, and puts her down.

Then they begin walking again. The monks walk for five more miles, and the younger monk says, “It’s really been making me crazy that you just touched that woman. We’re not supposed to touch women. How could you do that? And the older monk says, “Well, I put her down back by the river. You’ve been carrying her for the last five miles.”

JG: Sarah Ruhl’s play is, on one level, about coming to terms with loss. This concept seems

to be at the heart of Buddhist philosophy.

LA: In Buddhism there is the belief that life is suffering. You look at the origin of suffering. You look at the path out of suffering. What I found so inspiring about that teaching is that even though its basis is not looking for happiness, even though it starts with the idea that life is suffering, it is about joy and happiness.

JG: You recently said something that so startled me: that very few people write about the hallucinatory joy you feel when you lose a loved one.

LA: I was not particularly prepared for Lou’s death, even though I sort of thought I was.

I was not prepared for the completeness of the experience. When you lose your partner, you lose your witness. And that relationship is so completely gone that there’s no holding on to it.

JG: How do you find the joy?

LA: The joy finds you. It just comes into you. It invades you. I was filled with a lot of energy.

Lou’s Tai Chi teacher created a five-minute series of martial arts for him. Basically, it is a ritual in which you can actually draw energy from the earth toward yourself. They are really beautiful and fierce moves. Once, I asked Lou what one of the moves was. And he goes, “Well, that’s decapitation.” (Laughter) I practice twice a week, so I have contact with that joy two times a week. I trust my body.

JG: The subtitle of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is The Great Liberation Through Hearing. Why does it focus on hearing as the great liberation?

LA: Well, as teaching, of course, but, also, hearing is considered a very important sense, because it’s the last sense to go when you die. The book is very focused on how the body shuts down, and in what order. Your eyes go dark. Your brain flatlines. Your heart stops. But your ear hammers are still working. It describes this period of time in which you are quite confused. I’ve been in the room when people have died, and I had the feeling that that’s what’s going on.

There’s a sense of confusion as the energy is zipping around. I consider the act of dying to be just as absolutely important as being born. It’s a part of the cycle.

JG: Is there a central consciousness that evolves, or is it fluid?

LA: I think that energy is continuous. I always felt that, even as a kid. I was a sky

© Josef Hoflehner/ Courtesy, Benrubi Gallery, New York.

JG: Would a bardo apply to Lolabelle?

LA: To all beings. It applies to a fly. It applies to an enlightened being. There’s no real hierarchy—well, no, I take that back.

There’s a hierarchy, because we are moving slowly, in my opinion, toward complexity.

JG: That would astonish me. I always thought that things, as they evolved, became simpler.

LA: Well, that’s just my personal belief.

JG: Is there a celebration at the end of the bardo?

LA: I added the fiftieth day, which was the day of the Apollo, as this kind of liberation moment. What we did when Lou died was every Sunday for seven weeks we met with different groups of people to celebrate different aspects of his life. I just invited them over and people would come by and talk about one group of things that he did. There was one day on design—he designed glasses and briefcases and guitars and sound equipment. He was a real wirehead; he really knew equipment and loved it, and design, and clothes. Another Sunday was photography and film, because he had made some films and he was a wonderful photographer who knew all about cameras.

JG: You wrote about Lou’s death and what a remarkable experience it was.

LA: It was—it was a conscious experience.

He was conscious until the moment his heart stopped. Fully conscious.

JG: How long before he died did he know that he was dying?

LA: Well, in a certain way twenty minutes, and in another way he had been sick for two years. But we never accepted that he was going to succumb to this. It was a very positive, very aggressive, very hopeful situation. For many months we were prepared— with our suitcases packed and being twenty minutes from an airport—to go and have a liver transplant. That was our life. Once he got the transplant, it seemed like he would be ninety-three, just the way his mother was. He was really strong, a Tai Chi master and a health-conscious person.

JG: Did you and Lou have a guide who took you through Lou’s dying?

LA: Our teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, is on a three-year retreat and he’s in a cave somewhere. We don’t know where he is.

JG: So you had no one to talk to?

LA: Well, when you have a teacher it’s wonderful to have him physically there, but one

a harmonious house

16

probably the thing that astounds me the most is his ability to love—people, things, guitars, the sky, nature, Tai Chi, learning things. He was a learner. He had many, many teachers. Andy Warhol. Bob Wilson.

Mingyur Rinpoche. Master Ren. JG: When you first experienced the Buddhist world, was it accidental or were you seeking?

LA: I was looking for something.

JG: Did you immediately think, Oh, I know I’m on the right path.

LA: No, I don’t know that I’m on the right path. When you’re sitting there for ten days not talking, most of the time you’re going, What the hell am I doing here? What a waste of time. It’s really agony. Your mind is busy telling you what a jerk you are. I am probably like a lot of people—there’s a committee of people with clipboards who tell me what a jerk I am every day. They also tell me what a stupid thing I said yesterday and how terrible my hair looks. You know? (Laughter) I didn’t want that chatter, and I didn’t want that judgment. That’s why I was attracted to this way of looking at the world. Then, like everyone, I’d go somewhere, then I’d forget. Then I’d go somewhere a little farther, and I’d forget again. That’s okay with me as well. What I’ve learned in the last year or so, in taking care of my husband as he died, and then looking at life after that, has been so thrilling that I feel like I woke up in many different ways. That particular door swings open once in your life if you’re really lucky. You get a chance to be catapulted out of your life and see it in a very different way.

I am a child of the West. I was born and bred in Switzerland to a Tibetan mother and a Swiss father. I grew up in a cross-cultural household with my parents, a younger brother, and a Tibetan grandmother, who happens to be a nun. Each year we celebrated two New Years, the Western and the Tibetan; we observed Christmas, Easter, and Saka Dawa, the celebration of the birth, enlightenment, and death of Buddha. Tibet is only a small part of my life. And yet, even though I have never lived there, my spiritual approach to life is rooted in Tibetan culture.

Our grandmother taught us Tibetan prayers, my father read us a children’s book about Buddha, and our mother introduced us to Tibetan food. My mother cooked dishes from all over the world, eager to introduce us to different cultures.

My brother and I were the only kids I knew who were allowed to eat rice and dal with our hands. This was new to the Swiss but normal for us.

Despite our exile from Tibet, my brother and I learned Tibetan. These words planted the seeds of Tibetan culture in our hearts. This culture will always be a part of us. Regardless of the fact that we don’t know the Tibetan national anthem by heart, have many gaps in our language, and can’t read or write Tibetan, the essence of the culture is anchored deep within us. For the first six years of my life I spoke only Tibetan, but when I began kindergarten the Swiss-German began to dominate. My mother continued to speak Tibetan with us, but we soon started to answer in Swiss-German. The only person we spoke Tibetan with was my grandmother, who had never learned German very well. Tibetan was our secret language that no one else understood, and we used it for a good laugh with my grandmother. When our friends came over and wanted to say “Thank you” or “Hello” to my grandmother in Tibetan, we would tell them something totally different. We loved my grandmother’s laughter and the way she’d glance at my brother and me when they repeated whatever silly words we had taught them.

My grandmother and my mother fled Tibet in 1959, after the Chinese invaded and began systematically arresting, torturing, and imprisoning Tibetans. My mother grew up as a refugee in India, where she met my Swiss father, a student who was studying Buddhism. Two years later, he married my mother and, together with my grandmother, they moved to Switzerland.

The move not only took my mother and my grandmother from one continent to another; it catapulted the two Tibetan women into a new age. Everything was new to them. Leafy greens, for example. No Tibetan would eat raw vegetables, certainly no leaves, let alone in such huge quantities. My mother and my grandmother had never seen a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. They were surprised by how often people showered and washed. In Tibet, this would have been a sign of excessive pride and arrogance. They had to learn that the Swiss do not speak with their mouths full, make noises when they eat, or slurp their tea. For the most part they adjusted, learning new ways of eating, doing, and being, but both women always maintained a deep belief in Buddhism.

When people ask me what my religion is, I tell them that I was born and raised as a Buddhist. My spiritual approach to life comes from Buddhism. I see it more as a philosophy for living than as a religion. Compassion is the very essence of a spiritual life, and it is something that I try to give and to extend to other people. I believe that what I project is also what I get back. So if I am angry I will receive anger back, but if I feel love and compassion, then love and compassion come back to me. I believe in positive thinking, giving, caring, and understanding. Those are the values I saw in my parents and my grandmother, who built the base for my spiritual beliefs.

Of course, I didn’t always agree with everything my grandmother believed. She is a very religious person who has remained unquestioningly loyal to her Tibetan values. Every once in a while, she would try to impose these values on my brother and me when we were growing up. For instance, my grandmother found it troubling that I was left-handed. © Josef Hoflehner/ Courtesy, Benrubi Gallery, New York.

Photographs © Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos.

worshipper. I loved the sky. I loved the fact that it was a void (Laughter) and there was so much of it. So my personal feeling, based only on being in the world, is that I identify with being part of an energy scheme.

JG: What is the source of evil in the world, or the things that cause us pain?

LA: Ignorance. One of the things that you do with each meditation session is dedicate it to the enlightenment of all beings, the liberation from suffering.

JG: In the play, the monks have come to take the child away. Is there a hierarchy that the mother must recognize, a greater duty? If something greater than you says you have to give up something that you love—if somebody said she found the original owner of Lolabelle, who now needs a therapy dog, and Lolabelle is the only dog who can do it...

LA: Oh, good example. (Laughs) Yes, that’s about non-grasping. You don’t own anything. A couple of weekends ago, a friend was talking about how he’d lost so many people that he loved. And these were like love affairs. And he felt that he’d lost women. And this teacher said, “You didn’t lose them. You never had them. You don’t own these relationships. They are things that happened.”

JG: And that’s where the joy comes from?

LA: Yes. JG: So now you’re honoring the fact that the stream of life brought you and Lou together.

LA: Yes. You don’t lose someone, but that’s the kind of feeling that you have as a couple—that you belong to somebody. Maybe you really belong. But that sense of possession—you have to be so careful with that.

If I look at Lou’s life and all his greatness,

JG: That door opened after Lou’s death, for the first time?

LA: Yes. It was something I always hoped I could see and understand. I don’t understand most of it, but Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings on natural mind, grasping, and compassion are things that mean very different things to me now.

JG: If you need a teacher, what do you say?

LA: Usually it’s: “How can I deal with this particular suffering?” I am failing, or I feel like I’m just disappearing. It generally has to do with suffering.

JG: How long would a meeting with your teacher last?

LA: Two minutes. One hour. Ten years. Also, a lot of teachers emphasize that you don’t have to see them all the time. However, I do really miss my teacher, who’s been away for three years in his cave. He’s done three three-year meditations. His first was when he was sixteen. Then he became a meditation master—and he’s a young guy; he’s in his thirties. Then, three years ago, he prepared all of his students all over the world— he said, “I’m going to leave.” And he was supposed to leave with his two attendant lamas, but the night before he left a note saying, “I’m leaving. Don’t look for me.”

They did look for him, and two years later they found him in a cave. So we know he’s around, somewhere, meditating. He is my teacher, even though I can’t find him— but when he comes back I will find him. I know some of his teachings, and I can read his works, and I can meditate, and I can open myself to learning things. That’s what I attempt to do.

For example, in January I spent some time in a jungle in Malaysia with a friend of mine. He was kind of a night owl, so I hardly ever saw him. I was by myself, reading the teachings of my teacher in the jungle.

I was reading about the natural mind—that is, what happens when you use your mind to look at your mind. There are many concepts and consequences of that practice that I have never been able to understand. Because the consequences are you really have seen that we’re not sitting here—and to me that was just voodoo, more or less. Now when I read these sentences over and over, jungle slow, I suddenly go, “Oh, my gosh. I actually understand this.” Of course, I don’t fully understand it, but I get a little bit closer.

by ya ngz o m braue n

She and my mother believed that the left hand is bad and the right hand is good. Even though my mother read a lot of Western books, which argued that this old notion was nonsense, my grandmother still half-believed this and thought it was a shame that I was born left-handed. Together they managed to make my right hand the dominant one. Whenever I wrote with my right hand or presented the right hand to greet someone, I would receive money. Now I am able to write with both my left and my right hand, and I can write with both hands simultaneously—one moving forward and the other moving backward. I can write upside down and mirror-inverted. Today, my mother no longer understands what is so bad about being left-handed, but my grandmother is convinced that she was right.

My grandmother said her prayers every morning and evening, never missing a day, even when she was in a hospital.

My mother was eager to blend into the Western world, but still respected her mother’s values. My father, a cultural and

17

a harmonious house

16

probably the thing that astounds me the most is his ability to love—people, things, guitars, the sky, nature, Tai Chi, learning things. He was a learner. He had many, many teachers. Andy Warhol. Bob Wilson.

Mingyur Rinpoche. Master Ren. JG: When you first experienced the Buddhist world, was it accidental or were you seeking?

LA: I was looking for something.

JG: Did you immediately think, Oh, I know I’m on the right path.

LA: No, I don’t know that I’m on the right path. When you’re sitting there for ten days not talking, most of the time you’re going, What the hell am I doing here? What a waste of time. It’s really agony. Your mind is busy telling you what a jerk you are. I am probably like a lot of people—there’s a committee of people with clipboards who tell me what a jerk I am every day. They also tell me what a stupid thing I said yesterday and how terrible my hair looks. You know? (Laughter) I didn’t want that chatter, and I didn’t want that judgment. That’s why I was attracted to this way of looking at the world. Then, like everyone, I’d go somewhere, then I’d forget. Then I’d go somewhere a little farther, and I’d forget again. That’s okay with me as well. What I’ve learned in the last year or so, in taking care of my husband as he died, and then looking at life after that, has been so thrilling that I feel like I woke up in many different ways. That particular door swings open once in your life if you’re really lucky. You get a chance to be catapulted out of your life and see it in a very different way.

I am a child of the West. I was born and bred in Switzerland to a Tibetan mother and a Swiss father. I grew up in a cross-cultural household with my parents, a younger brother, and a Tibetan grandmother, who happens to be a nun. Each year we celebrated two New Years, the Western and the Tibetan; we observed Christmas, Easter, and Saka Dawa, the celebration of the birth, enlightenment, and death of Buddha. Tibet is only a small part of my life. And yet, even though I have never lived there, my spiritual approach to life is rooted in Tibetan culture.

Our grandmother taught us Tibetan prayers, my father read us a children’s book about Buddha, and our mother introduced us to Tibetan food. My mother cooked dishes from all over the world, eager to introduce us to different cultures.

My brother and I were the only kids I knew who were allowed to eat rice and dal with our hands. This was new to the Swiss but normal for us.

Despite our exile from Tibet, my brother and I learned Tibetan. These words planted the seeds of Tibetan culture in our hearts. This culture will always be a part of us. Regardless of the fact that we don’t know the Tibetan national anthem by heart, have many gaps in our language, and can’t read or write Tibetan, the essence of the culture is anchored deep within us. For the first six years of my life I spoke only Tibetan, but when I began kindergarten the Swiss-German began to dominate. My mother continued to speak Tibetan with us, but we soon started to answer in Swiss-German. The only person we spoke Tibetan with was my grandmother, who had never learned German very well. Tibetan was our secret language that no one else understood, and we used it for a good laugh with my grandmother. When our friends came over and wanted to say “Thank you” or “Hello” to my grandmother in Tibetan, we would tell them something totally different. We loved my grandmother’s laughter and the way she’d glance at my brother and me when they repeated whatever silly words we had taught them.

My grandmother and my mother fled Tibet in 1959, after the Chinese invaded and began systematically arresting, torturing, and imprisoning Tibetans. My mother grew up as a refugee in India, where she met my Swiss father, a student who was studying Buddhism. Two years later, he married my mother and, together with my grandmother, they moved to Switzerland.

The move not only took my mother and my grandmother from one continent to another; it catapulted the two Tibetan women into a new age. Everything was new to them. Leafy greens, for example. No Tibetan would eat raw vegetables, certainly no leaves, let alone in such huge quantities. My mother and my grandmother had never seen a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. They were surprised by how often people showered and washed. In Tibet, this would have been a sign of excessive pride and arrogance. They had to learn that the Swiss do not speak with their mouths full, make noises when they eat, or slurp their tea. For the most part they adjusted, learning new ways of eating, doing, and being, but both women always maintained a deep belief in Buddhism.

When people ask me what my religion is, I tell them that I was born and raised as a Buddhist. My spiritual approach to life comes from Buddhism. I see it more as a philosophy for living than as a religion. Compassion is the very essence of a spiritual life, and it is something that I try to give and to extend to other people. I believe that what I project is also what I get back. So if I am angry I will receive anger back, but if I feel love and compassion, then love and compassion come back to me. I believe in positive thinking, giving, caring, and understanding. Those are the values I saw in my parents and my grandmother, who built the base for my spiritual beliefs.

Of course, I didn’t always agree with everything my grandmother believed. She is a very religious person who has remained unquestioningly loyal to her Tibetan values. Every once in a while, she would try to impose these values on my brother and me when we were growing up. For instance, my grandmother found it troubling that I was left-handed. © Josef Hoflehner/ Courtesy, Benrubi Gallery, New York.

Photographs © Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos.

worshipper. I loved the sky. I loved the fact that it was a void (Laughter) and there was so much of it. So my personal feeling, based only on being in the world, is that I identify with being part of an energy scheme.

JG: What is the source of evil in the world, or the things that cause us pain?

LA: Ignorance. One of the things that you do with each meditation session is dedicate it to the enlightenment of all beings, the liberation from suffering.

JG: In the play, the monks have come to take the child away. Is there a hierarchy that the mother must recognize, a greater duty? If something greater than you says you have to give up something that you love—if somebody said she found the original owner of Lolabelle, who now needs a therapy dog, and Lolabelle is the only dog who can do it...

LA: Oh, good example. (Laughs) Yes, that’s about non-grasping. You don’t own anything. A couple of weekends ago, a friend was talking about how he’d lost so many people that he loved. And these were like love affairs. And he felt that he’d lost women. And this teacher said, “You didn’t lose them. You never had them. You don’t own these relationships. They are things that happened.”

JG: And that’s where the joy comes from?

LA: Yes. JG: So now you’re honoring the fact that the stream of life brought you and Lou together.

LA: Yes. You don’t lose someone, but that’s the kind of feeling that you have as a couple—that you belong to somebody. Maybe you really belong. But that sense of possession—you have to be so careful with that.

If I look at Lou’s life and all his greatness,

JG: That door opened after Lou’s death, for the first time?

LA: Yes. It was something I always hoped I could see and understand. I don’t understand most of it, but Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings on natural mind, grasping, and compassion are things that mean very different things to me now.

JG: If you need a teacher, what do you say?

LA: Usually it’s: “How can I deal with this particular suffering?” I am failing, or I feel like I’m just disappearing. It generally has to do with suffering.

JG: How long would a meeting with your teacher last?

LA: Two minutes. One hour. Ten years. Also, a lot of teachers emphasize that you don’t have to see them all the time. However, I do really miss my teacher, who’s been away for three years in his cave. He’s done three three-year meditations. His first was when he was sixteen. Then he became a meditation master—and he’s a young guy; he’s in his thirties. Then, three years ago, he prepared all of his students all over the world— he said, “I’m going to leave.” And he was supposed to leave with his two attendant lamas, but the night before he left a note saying, “I’m leaving. Don’t look for me.”

They did look for him, and two years later they found him in a cave. So we know he’s around, somewhere, meditating. He is my teacher, even though I can’t find him— but when he comes back I will find him. I know some of his teachings, and I can read his works, and I can meditate, and I can open myself to learning things. That’s what I attempt to do.

For example, in January I spent some time in a jungle in Malaysia with a friend of mine. He was kind of a night owl, so I hardly ever saw him. I was by myself, reading the teachings of my teacher in the jungle.

I was reading about the natural mind—that is, what happens when you use your mind to look at your mind. There are many concepts and consequences of that practice that I have never been able to understand. Because the consequences are you really have seen that we’re not sitting here—and to me that was just voodoo, more or less. Now when I read these sentences over and over, jungle slow, I suddenly go, “Oh, my gosh. I actually understand this.” Of course, I don’t fully understand it, but I get a little bit closer.

by ya ngz o m braue n

She and my mother believed that the left hand is bad and the right hand is good. Even though my mother read a lot of Western books, which argued that this old notion was nonsense, my grandmother still half-believed this and thought it was a shame that I was born left-handed. Together they managed to make my right hand the dominant one. Whenever I wrote with my right hand or presented the right hand to greet someone, I would receive money. Now I am able to write with both my left and my right hand, and I can write with both hands simultaneously—one moving forward and the other moving backward. I can write upside down and mirror-inverted. Today, my mother no longer understands what is so bad about being left-handed, but my grandmother is convinced that she was right.

My grandmother said her prayers every morning and evening, never missing a day, even when she was in a hospital.

My mother was eager to blend into the Western world, but still respected her mother’s values. My father, a cultural and

17

social anthropologist specializing in Asia, is a skeptic. He questions so-called facts: Is there proof for this and that? He has the skeptical approach of the scientist. So he also scrutinized the concept of reincarnation and rebirth.

For Tibetan believers, like my grandmother, reincarnation is a fact; it is not subject to question. The belief in rebirth is the basis of the Buddhist system. The difference between being reborn and being reincarnated is often misunderstood in the West. Buddhists believe that every human will be reborn, nearly endlessly. We may be reborn as an animal, an insect, or, again, as a human being. You can stop the cycle of rebirth only if you attain Buddhahood. Only highly accomplished spiritual people have the ability to be reincarnated, which means that they will remember their previous lives and can control their reincarnation. An individual who returns as a Dalai Lama or in another reincarnation can stop the cycle of reincarnation if he wants to. Such a person is actually already enlightened but chooses to reincarnate into a human again in order to help others who are suffering. That’s why we call him a bodhisattva—someone who is always being reborn, and never disappears, until the sufferings of sentient beings have ended.

My grandmother would never question the system of reincarnation or ask when it started and why it started. That is simply how it is. My father, however, asks when and why it was “invented.” My mother is torn between the two. For my brother and me, it was much easier to accept the different views. We do question, however. We don’t blindly believe. For me, it makes sense that the concept of reincarnation was not known in early Buddhism. It is interesting that the fourteenth Dalai Lama, without doubting the concept of reincarnation, is not comfortable with some aspects of the way Tibetans apply the system today. In an interview with my father, the Dalai Lama criticized the many reincarnation lineages and lines of descent that have come into being since he has been in exile. His criticism stems from the fact that each reincarnation establishes a small realm that can grow into a powerful institution in which the reincarnated lama becomes very influential.

Could there be a female reincarnation? My grandmother would tell me that this is extremely unlikely. In Tibetan Buddhism, women are considered to be lower than men. My grandmother, who has been a devoted nun since she was five years old, would never set herself higher than an average man. I never accepted this, but it did not make sense to challenge my grandmother, as I knew that her deep-rooted beliefs would never change. I am curious to see if, over time, now that Buddhism has spread, there will be a female reincarnation of a high lama or even a female Dalai Lama.

For his book project The Dalai Lamas: A Visual History, my father asked His Holiness if he could imagine being reincarnated as a woman or even as a Westerner. The Dalai Lama is a very open-minded, thoughtful man, a great example of a deeply religious person who comes from a very old traditional Tibetan belief system where thoughts like this would never occur. He answered, “Yes, this is possible....But in case the Tibetan people want to follow the previous way or system, then I made it very clear: If I die today, and most Tibetan people want to have another incarnation, in that case I will die in a foreign country as a refugee with a certain purpose. Because that purpose is not yet fulfilled, therefore my incarnation logically will appear outside Tibet. Male or female? According to the new reality, if a female reincarnation would be more useful to the larger following, then a female reincarnation is very possible. Then I usually say in a half-joke, not only a female but also a very beautiful female, who can be more influential.”

I am thankful to have been born into a family where I could experience an unconditional belief in religion, a scientific approach to anything religious, and the middle path of both extremes. I was brought up in a very liberal way, in the sense that I was never forced to believe in any one thing. For me, there is no simple truth. Are we reborn after we pass away? Is My upbringing in a multicultural household gave me strength, made me open and sensitive to new things, approaches, and views. I never had to choose sides. Even though my grandmother wishes that I would be more traditional, she has always respected me for being who I am. At the end of the day, I grew up in a harmonious house where we respected one another. With respect and understanding, we can embrace a variety of cultures and develop into citizens of the world who respect one another.

Yangzom Brauen was brought up in Bern, Switzerland. After completing her studies at Europe’s prestigious University of Theater and Music in Bern, she began working in theater and film in Europe and America. Brauen is extremely active and vocal in the Tibetan Freedom movement. At one time, she was the president of the Tibetan Youth Association, where she organized public demonstrations and cultural events. Her first book, Across Many Mountains, which became an instant best-seller in Germany and Switzerland, is a memoir about three generations of Tibetan women: Brauen’s grandmother, her mother, and Brauen herself.

18

Painting by Namgay Phurba, Rocket and Garuda 2013.

Couresty of Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection.

it the way Tibetan monks tell us? Or is there another way that we still do not understand?

social anthropologist specializing in Asia, is a skeptic. He questions so-called facts: Is there proof for this and that? He has the skeptical approach of the scientist. So he also scrutinized the concept of reincarnation and rebirth.

For Tibetan believers, like my grandmother, reincarnation is a fact; it is not subject to question. The belief in rebirth is the basis of the Buddhist system. The difference between being reborn and being reincarnated is often misunderstood in the West. Buddhists believe that every human will be reborn, nearly endlessly. We may be reborn as an animal, an insect, or, again, as a human being. You can stop the cycle of rebirth only if you attain Buddhahood. Only highly accomplished spiritual people have the ability to be reincarnated, which means that they will remember their previous lives and can control their reincarnation. An individual who returns as a Dalai Lama or in another reincarnation can stop the cycle of reincarnation if he wants to. Such a person is actually already enlightened but chooses to reincarnate into a human again in order to help others who are suffering. That’s why we call him a bodhisattva—someone who is always being reborn, and never disappears, until the sufferings of sentient beings have ended.

My grandmother would never question the system of reincarnation or ask when it started and why it started. That is simply how it is. My father, however, asks when and why it was “invented.” My mother is torn between the two. For my brother and me, it was much easier to accept the different views. We do question, however. We don’t blindly believe. For me, it makes sense that the concept of reincarnation was not known in early Buddhism. It is interesting that the fourteenth Dalai Lama, without doubting the concept of reincarnation, is not comfortable with some aspects of the way Tibetans apply the system today. In an interview with my father, the Dalai Lama criticized the many reincarnation lineages and lines of descent that have come into being since he has been in exile. His criticism stems from the fact that each reincarnation establishes a small realm that can grow into a powerful institution in which the reincarnated lama becomes very influential.

Could there be a female reincarnation? My grandmother would tell me that this is extremely unlikely. In Tibetan Buddhism, women are considered to be lower than men. My grandmother, who has been a devoted nun since she was five years old, would never set herself higher than an average man. I never accepted this, but it did not make sense to challenge my grandmother, as I knew that her deep-rooted beliefs would never change. I am curious to see if, over time, now that Buddhism has spread, there will be a female reincarnation of a high lama or even a female Dalai Lama.

For his book project The Dalai Lamas: A Visual History, my father asked His Holiness if he could imagine being reincarnated as a woman or even as a Westerner. The Dalai Lama is a very open-minded, thoughtful man, a great example of a deeply religious person who comes from a very old traditional Tibetan belief system where thoughts like this would never occur. He answered, “Yes, this is possible....But in case the Tibetan people want to follow the previous way or system, then I made it very clear: If I die today, and most Tibetan people want to have another incarnation, in that case I will die in a foreign country as a refugee with a certain purpose. Because that purpose is not yet fulfilled, therefore my incarnation logically will appear outside Tibet. Male or female? According to the new reality, if a female reincarnation would be more useful to the larger following, then a female reincarnation is very possible. Then I usually say in a half-joke, not only a female but also a very beautiful female, who can be more influential.”

I am thankful to have been born into a family where I could experience an unconditional belief in religion, a scientific approach to anything religious, and the middle path of both extremes. I was brought up in a very liberal way, in the sense that I was never forced to believe in any one thing. For me, there is no simple truth. Are we reborn after we pass away? Is My upbringing in a multicultural household gave me strength, made me open and sensitive to new things, approaches, and views. I never had to choose sides. Even though my grandmother wishes that I would be more traditional, she has always respected me for being who I am. At the end of the day, I grew up in a harmonious house where we respected one another. With respect and understanding, we can embrace a variety of cultures and develop into citizens of the world who respect one another.

Yangzom Brauen was brought up in Bern, Switzerland. After completing her studies at Europe’s prestigious University of Theater and Music in Bern, she began working in theater and film in Europe and America. Brauen is extremely active and vocal in the Tibetan Freedom movement. At one time, she was the president of the Tibetan Youth Association, where she organized public demonstrations and cultural events. Her first book, Across Many Mountains, which became an instant best-seller in Germany and Switzerland, is a memoir about three generations of Tibetan women: Brauen’s grandmother, her mother, and Brauen herself.

18

Painting by Namgay Phurba, Rocket and Garuda 2013.

Couresty of Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection.

it the way Tibetan monks tell us? Or is there another way that we still do not understand?

how t o belong

© Abelardo Morell, Balancing Pencils, 2002. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery.

In his structural analysis of fairy tales, the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp noted that in a fairy tale the function of a role never changes. The character who plays the role might have varying attributes (old, male, female, beautiful or plain), but the role itself—donor, helper, hero—remains static. I think this could also apply to academic mentorship. The roles of mentor and student stay the same, but the characters who play these roles keep changing as time marches forward.

For six years, while earning a master’s degree and then a doctorate in folklore at Memorial University in Newfoundland, I was cast in the role of student. It was an inescapable moniker, despite my accomplishments as a writer, a journalist, and a mother. During this time my supervisor, Gerald Pocius (known to students and peers as Jerry), was my mentor. Then, in early fall of 2013, I donned the dark robes of transition and defended my Ph.D. “Come in, Dr. Urquhart,” Jerry said as he invited me into his office following my defense committee’s deliberations.

That night, I celebrated over pints of beer and deep-fried food at one of my favorite pubs. It was thrilling but unsettling.

Nostalgia gnawed at the edges of the evening. I no longer lived in St. John’s, the city in which I’d completed both degrees. Within a day, I’d be gone again. I already felt like a ghost. I was losing a significant piece of my history—a landscape, a community, and, perhaps most important, a mentor. Jerry would continue in that role, but I no longer had a part to play. ✐ A little more than three years earlier, in May 2010, I had moved to Upper Amherst Cove, a rural community on the Bonavista Peninsula about a three-hour drive from St. John’s. I brought my dog, my cat, and my partner, Andrew, who is an Arctic scientist and was often away in Labrador. We’d secured a cheap four-month rental, a saltbox in disrepair, by promising to reshingle the roof and paint the peeling clapboard exterior. We would live there while I researched my Ph.D. dissertation, asking locals how they felt about the recent influx of wealthy mainland Canadians and Americans buying former fishing homes and repurposing them as summer houses. I also planned to collect the newcomers’ arrival narratives, most of which had a supernatural element. They’d

found themselves on these rocky shores through a twist of fate, or had been driven there by a higher power. These outsiders had trickled in on the heels of the fishery collapse in the early nineties, but, more recently, there had been a flood of off-island buyers and the real-estate prices reflected this trend. I would spend the next four months listening to stories about this changing landscape and looking for patterns in the telling.

This would be done under the direction of my mentor, known, in his official capacity, as my graduate supervisor. Jerry is a wiry-haired, bespectacled member of the old academic wave of folklore fieldworkers.

He was a heartier breed than the new stock of folklorists. He was the kind of man who spent time in the back kitchens and wood lots of rural folks, earning their trust and recording their stories. He is renowned for being “an interpreter of everyday objects.”

He looked at how the furniture was arranged in these kitchens in relation to sociability.

He mapped the secret paths that led to the wood lots, and in this way learned the literacy of the landscape.

For me, this was a new way of understanding the arrangement of the world—socially and physically. After reading his work in the first semester of my studies, I’d made an appointment to meet with Jerry in late fall of 2006. Because there were so many books in the entrance to his office, Jerry was difficult to locate that afternoon. I’d peered through the door and seen nothing but shelves sagging under the weight of his personal library. It was labyrinthine and claustrophobic. There was a door slightly ajar at the end of a short hall, allowing a sliver of natural light into the windowless space. Inside, Jerry was on the phone and he waved me in when I knocked. That day, he agreed to supervise my thesis, and we would meet often in that office. The book stacks expanded weekly, and he was always on the phone when I arrived.

I continued working with Jerry for both of my graduate degrees. During the lengthy grant-writing process to secure the research funding for my dissertation, I’d whined to him about the strict parameters set by the government agency.

“I want to spend my time looking at chairs all day,” he said. “To do that, you have to jump through some hoops.”

by e mily urquha r t

My funding came through. It was an astonishing and prestigious scholarship that would enable me to support myself and carry out the project I’d proposed. I’d jumped through the hoops, and what I wanted to do—move to an outport village to research and write about a landscape in transition— was now possible. This was both thrilling and intimidating.

Jerry would be living nearby during the summer months, not to supervise my research but because he happens to be an American who owns a former fishing home in eastern Newfoundland. Except that he didn’t fit in with the summer crowd. He wasn’t an outcast, nor was he surly or unfriendly to the seasonal residents, but he wasn’t a part of them, either. He wasn’t interested in their dinner parties or their new business ventures that grew like wildflowers every year—an art gallery, a high-end coffee shop, a local-food restaurant. Or, rather, he was interested but only in what the locals had to say about the tide of foreigners turning up on their shores. For me, a stranger, a story-hunter, a come-fromaway, as mainlanders are known on the island, those stories were elusive. For Jerry, they flowed like water. How, I wondered, did he shed his outsider status and manage to belong? ✐ Jerry is best known for his work in the town of Calvert, on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula (a different community from the one in which he would eventually buy a home). He spent time there looking at place and space, ideas that he expressed in his book, A Place to Belong: Community, Order and Everyday Space in Calvert, Newfoundland, which won several prestigious awards when it was published in the late seventies.

I never knew the younger incarnation of my mentor. I sometimes wondered if he’d felt unsure, or silly, or obvious as an interloper in those rural surroundings, as I often did, thirty years later.

Unlike Jerry, I wanted to fit in with both worlds. I wanted to glide between the clinking glasses on the decks of tony summer homes and the more intimate setting of the locals’ linoleum-floored kitchens. Jerry preferred to watch wrestling with his neighbor Rosie than to drink cocktails with his fellow patriots, but his behavior never seemed affected. He never appeared to be trying not to exclude or include himself. This is why an 21

how t o belong

© Abelardo Morell, Balancing Pencils, 2002. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery.

In his structural analysis of fairy tales, the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp noted that in a fairy tale the function of a role never changes. The character who plays the role might have varying attributes (old, male, female, beautiful or plain), but the role itself—donor, helper, hero—remains static. I think this could also apply to academic mentorship. The roles of mentor and student stay the same, but the characters who play these roles keep changing as time marches forward.

For six years, while earning a master’s degree and then a doctorate in folklore at Memorial University in Newfoundland, I was cast in the role of student. It was an inescapable moniker, despite my accomplishments as a writer, a journalist, and a mother. During this time my supervisor, Gerald Pocius (known to students and peers as Jerry), was my mentor. Then, in early fall of 2013, I donned the dark robes of transition and defended my Ph.D. “Come in, Dr. Urquhart,” Jerry said as he invited me into his office following my defense committee’s deliberations.

That night, I celebrated over pints of beer and deep-fried food at one of my favorite pubs. It was thrilling but unsettling.

Nostalgia gnawed at the edges of the evening. I no longer lived in St. John’s, the city in which I’d completed both degrees. Within a day, I’d be gone again. I already felt like a ghost. I was losing a significant piece of my history—a landscape, a community, and, perhaps most important, a mentor. Jerry would continue in that role, but I no longer had a part to play. ✐ A little more than three years earlier, in May 2010, I had moved to Upper Amherst Cove, a rural community on the Bonavista Peninsula about a three-hour drive from St. John’s. I brought my dog, my cat, and my partner, Andrew, who is an Arctic scientist and was often away in Labrador. We’d secured a cheap four-month rental, a saltbox in disrepair, by promising to reshingle the roof and paint the peeling clapboard exterior. We would live there while I researched my Ph.D. dissertation, asking locals how they felt about the recent influx of wealthy mainland Canadians and Americans buying former fishing homes and repurposing them as summer houses. I also planned to collect the newcomers’ arrival narratives, most of which had a supernatural element. They’d

found themselves on these rocky shores through a twist of fate, or had been driven there by a higher power. These outsiders had trickled in on the heels of the fishery collapse in the early nineties, but, more recently, there had been a flood of off-island buyers and the real-estate prices reflected this trend. I would spend the next four months listening to stories about this changing landscape and looking for patterns in the telling.

This would be done under the direction of my mentor, known, in his official capacity, as my graduate supervisor. Jerry is a wiry-haired, bespectacled member of the old academic wave of folklore fieldworkers.

He was a heartier breed than the new stock of folklorists. He was the kind of man who spent time in the back kitchens and wood lots of rural folks, earning their trust and recording their stories. He is renowned for being “an interpreter of everyday objects.”

He looked at how the furniture was arranged in these kitchens in relation to sociability.

He mapped the secret paths that led to the wood lots, and in this way learned the literacy of the landscape.

For me, this was a new way of understanding the arrangement of the world—socially and physically. After reading his work in the first semester of my studies, I’d made an appointment to meet with Jerry in late fall of 2006. Because there were so many books in the entrance to his office, Jerry was difficult to locate that afternoon. I’d peered through the door and seen nothing but shelves sagging under the weight of his personal library. It was labyrinthine and claustrophobic. There was a door slightly ajar at the end of a short hall, allowing a sliver of natural light into the windowless space. Inside, Jerry was on the phone and he waved me in when I knocked. That day, he agreed to supervise my thesis, and we would meet often in that office. The book stacks expanded weekly, and he was always on the phone when I arrived.

I continued working with Jerry for both of my graduate degrees. During the lengthy grant-writing process to secure the research funding for my dissertation, I’d whined to him about the strict parameters set by the government agency.

“I want to spend my time looking at chairs all day,” he said. “To do that, you have to jump through some hoops.”

by e mily urquha r t

My funding came through. It was an astonishing and prestigious scholarship that would enable me to support myself and carry out the project I’d proposed. I’d jumped through the hoops, and what I wanted to do—move to an outport village to research and write about a landscape in transition— was now possible. This was both thrilling and intimidating.

Jerry would be living nearby during the summer months, not to supervise my research but because he happens to be an American who owns a former fishing home in eastern Newfoundland. Except that he didn’t fit in with the summer crowd. He wasn’t an outcast, nor was he surly or unfriendly to the seasonal residents, but he wasn’t a part of them, either. He wasn’t interested in their dinner parties or their new business ventures that grew like wildflowers every year—an art gallery, a high-end coffee shop, a local-food restaurant. Or, rather, he was interested but only in what the locals had to say about the tide of foreigners turning up on their shores. For me, a stranger, a story-hunter, a come-fromaway, as mainlanders are known on the island, those stories were elusive. For Jerry, they flowed like water. How, I wondered, did he shed his outsider status and manage to belong? ✐ Jerry is best known for his work in the town of Calvert, on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula (a different community from the one in which he would eventually buy a home). He spent time there looking at place and space, ideas that he expressed in his book, A Place to Belong: Community, Order and Everyday Space in Calvert, Newfoundland, which won several prestigious awards when it was published in the late seventies.

I never knew the younger incarnation of my mentor. I sometimes wondered if he’d felt unsure, or silly, or obvious as an interloper in those rural surroundings, as I often did, thirty years later.

Unlike Jerry, I wanted to fit in with both worlds. I wanted to glide between the clinking glasses on the decks of tony summer homes and the more intimate setting of the locals’ linoleum-floored kitchens. Jerry preferred to watch wrestling with his neighbor Rosie than to drink cocktails with his fellow patriots, but his behavior never seemed affected. He never appeared to be trying not to exclude or include himself. This is why an 21

a connected exis tence:

an inter view with his eminence the seventh kyabje yongzin ling r inpoche American-born academic can come close to assimilating in a dwindling Newfoundland outport. Even if that was never his aim.

The stories I collected in Upper Amherst Cove that summer and the next were never as rich or as layered as the anecdotes that Jerry relayed from the community in which he lived, about a forty-minute drive away.

By then, he’d been there for three decades.

The truth was that he wasn’t trying to extract information, and this is exactly why people told him those stories. He’d already done this—in a different geography, and during a different stage in his life. His interest was genuine and without objective. It was as if in the golden years of his career he had transcended to a higher realm of scholarship.

Jerry is a fellow of the American Folklore Society and the Royal Society of Canada (the country’s highest scholarly honor), and he has published more than seventy articles on aspects as varied as Newfoundland’s Christmas mummering tradition and contemporary wrestling. While he’s not above critique from his peers, in both his life and his career, he has moved beyond the point of caring too deeply.

This was a level of being that I hadn’t yet achieved as I faced the academic critiques being lobbed my way. Several professors in the folklore department expressed concerns about my journalistic style of writing. I’d worked as a reporter and as a freelance writer for six years before entering graduate school, and this was reflected in the papers I turned in. I spoke about this with Jerry a few times, telling him that I simply couldn’t adopt the academic prose and asking if this meant that I didn’t belong in graduate school.

“I’ve been told that I write like a journalist,” Jerry said.

“Was it said as a compliment?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he answered, shrugging.

“This looks like the book based on the dissertation,” one of my reviewers commented in her critique of my thesis. I remembered what Jerry said, and how he said it. I shrugged, diploma in hand. ✐ Sometimes other graduate students would describe long therapy-like sessions with their supervisors during which they sobbed out personal issues alongside their fears of academic failure—a broken rela-

22

tionship, a rejected thesis proposal, lost loves and lost funding. This is not the relationship I had with my own mentor. When I heard about these emotional tête-à-têtes, I occasionally tried to imagine a similar scenario between myself and Jerry. What would he do if I bawled in his office? I wondered.

Would he look away and distract himself with something on his computer or in one of the many piles of papers on his desk? Would he make an awkward attempt to comfort me, muttering words of encouragement, damning the man or professor or roommate who had caused my distress? Would he go into cardiac arrest from the stress of the situation? I never found out. The sob-and-share was never part of our relationship.

One summer I worked as Jerry’s teaching assistant during a fieldwork course that he runs in Harlow, U.K. There were a handful of graduate students, like myself, who were taking the upper-level version of the course, and a larger group of undergrads whose papers and field journals I marked in the evenings. We spent a lot of time on buses, heading off to field sites where we might ponder the vernacular choices of the Romans or the Tudors or the post–World War II suburban town planners.

During one of our coach rides, Jerry’s wife told a few of the graduate students how, when she was pregnant with their son, she accompanied Jerry on his biannual trip to Harlow, and how in some university town—Oxford, or maybe Cambridge—he bought so many books that he had to enlist her help in carrying them to the train station. They were late for their train and, while running on the platform, she fell, sending the books scattering.

I don’t remember how the story ended, only how it made me feel. I was uncomfortable with this window into my mentor’s domestic life. Whether the anecdote was meant as a humorous illustration of his devotion to knowledge or as a jab, I didn’t care. I realized that I wanted as little to do with his personal life as he did with mine. ✐ I never said goodbye to Jerry, at least not formally. After our last meeting, I’d stood in his doorway holding a tower of photocopied dissertations in my arms. “I’ll be back this afternoon,” I said, heading toward the graduate-studies department to fill out paperwork. It took longer than I’d

expected. Jerry needed to pick up his son from school, and when I went back the door to his office was closed. My flight left the island early the next morning.

There is no word for the free fall after the end of a significant mentorship. In folklore parlance, you might refer to this as a liminal space. It is an unknowable state of being, a kind of limbo. Henry Glassie, one of Jerry’s mentors, told him that after graduate school he would never again have the same freedom to explore his own ideas. He told Jerry not to take that time for granted.

I know this because Jerry told me this anecdote often. It’s been four years since I spent the spring and summer recording stories in Upper Amherst Cove. I’ve since had a child, moved across the country, and defended my Ph.D. I can’t imagine a future scenario in which I come up with an interesting notion and then move my entire family to an isolated region so that I can explore the idea further. It seems like a surreal dream or a movie, or, at the very least, someone else’s life. I listened to Glassie’s advice, passed on through Jerry, and I tried not to take my time as a student for granted. I think that, for the most part, I succeeded.

What I might add to that piece of wisdom is that you will also never have access to a mentor in the same way again. There may be other mentors after graduate school, but they will never be so focused on your ideas and your thoughts, the work you produce, or care as much about your future. Still, you can take comfort in the fact that life, even within the hallowed halls of academe, has a natural progression and that being a student is a liminal state. It doesn’t last forever. Eventually, it will be time to take on a new role.

Emily Urquhart is an award-winning writer and folklorist. Her first book, Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes, will be published in the spring of 2015. Her articles have appeared in Reader’s Digest and The Walrus among other publications. She lives in Victoria, B.C. with her husband and their daughter.

1. Where were you born? I was born in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh State, India, which is the seat-in-exile of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I was born in November 1985 to parents who were both refugees who had fled from Tibet.

2. At what age were you discovered to be a Rinpoche? In 1987, at the age of one year and nine months, I was recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the sixth Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche.

3. Do you know your family? Did you leave your family to join the monastery? Yes. After I was recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1987, I moved to Ling Labrang (the office and household of the Ling Rinpoche lineage), in Dharamsala. I was raised there and taken care of by members of the Ling Labrang, and from time to time my father, brothers, and sister would visit me. My mother passed away when I was just over one year old. At the age of five, I moved to Drepung Monastic University, in Mundgod Tibetan Settlement, South India. I began my monastic studies at Drepung, at the age of ten, and have since been engaged there in religious study and spiritual training under the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

4. How did your parents feel about the life that had been chosen for you? As is usually the case in Tibetan families, my parents felt very happy and honored to be blessed with the opportunity to give birth to the reincarnation of a high lama.

5. What is your relationship to your family now? Our relationship is and has always remained good, friendly, and positive.

6. What do you know about the lama who was reincarnated in you? The sixth Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche (1903–83) was the most senior tutor of His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama. He was also the ninety-seventh Gaden throne holder (the head of the Gelugpa School of Tibetan Buddhism), and one of the most learned scholars of the twentieth century. His many students included lamas, tulkus, and geshes from all the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

7. Have you ever helped find a Rinpoche? Yes, I have had this experience.

8. What is the difference between attachment and love? Attachment exaggerates or distorts the qualities of the object of attachment. It fools us and leads to suffering. Love, when it is pure, has no boundaries. It leads us to happiness. Love does not have the qualities of attachment.

9. Can you describe the difference between reincarnation and rebirth? They are the same. All beings do it. It is not only for tulkus. Every kind of being takes rebirth. Buddhism explains that the rebirth of ordinary beings—those who have not yet realized the path—is based on wherever their karma takes them.

When a highly realized being takes rebirth, it is by choice and for the benefit of all living beings, not for their own interests.

10. What is the most important aspect to convey to Westerners about Tibetan Buddhism? The practice of love and compassion. There are so many problems, and great suffering, in the world due to a lack of compassion and a lack of understanding of interdependence. The Buddhist concept of interdependence expands one’s scope of understanding and awareness beyond one’s self to the fact that everything arises from dependence upon multiple causes and conditions. That nothing exists as a single independent entity. Everything depends on something else for its existence. When we only think of our self, we neglect the interests of others and of society. The result is that we all suffer due to a limited scope of understanding. If we want a happier world, we need to work together through love and compassion.

11. Do you think there are any major misunderstandings on the part of Westerners? Yes. The images of tantra are misunderstood as sexual. One must study the sutras to understand their meaning. These images are just a symbol that can’t be viewed conventionally from a physical level. Another misunderstanding is Buddhism being viewed as a temporary solution, like therapies at a spa. Buddhism is meant to be practiced over lifetimes. Although one can make progress in one lifetime, you can’t expect to achieve everything.

12. Is there something important that the West should know about Tibet? Yes. It has preserved and propagated Buddha’s message of tolerance and nonviolence.

13. Would a Rinpoche choose a reincarnation in the West now, and if so why? A tulku’s reincarnation is about taking birth to benefit all beings. Buddhas have taken rebirth in many forms, including animals. Since the purpose of a tulku is to benefit all beings, their rebirths are not restricted to any country or race.

If a tulku takes birth in America, it is to benefit the American people through their own cultural understanding.

14. Can you explain how tulkus are recognized and how the tulku system began? Tulkus have been recognized since ancient times in India. This practice is not unique to Tibet. Before the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, there were many Buddhas.

The Tibetan institution of tulkus developed during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries as different schools of Tibetan Buddhism began to accept the possibility that exemplary figures might remain within the human world, manifesting from one lifetime to the next out of compassion to benefit all beings.

15. What would you suggest to a reader who is interested in learning more—a book to read, for example, or a place to visit?

India is a place to learn more. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has also written many books that may be helpful. They include A Simple Path: Basic Buddhist Teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life, The Four Noble Truths, and The Dalai Lama’s Book on Transformation.

a connected exis tence:

an inter view with his eminence the seventh kyabje yongzin ling r inpoche American-born academic can come close to assimilating in a dwindling Newfoundland outport. Even if that was never his aim.

The stories I collected in Upper Amherst Cove that summer and the next were never as rich or as layered as the anecdotes that Jerry relayed from the community in which he lived, about a forty-minute drive away.

By then, he’d been there for three decades.

The truth was that he wasn’t trying to extract information, and this is exactly why people told him those stories. He’d already done this—in a different geography, and during a different stage in his life. His interest was genuine and without objective. It was as if in the golden years of his career he had transcended to a higher realm of scholarship.

Jerry is a fellow of the American Folklore Society and the Royal Society of Canada (the country’s highest scholarly honor), and he has published more than seventy articles on aspects as varied as Newfoundland’s Christmas mummering tradition and contemporary wrestling. While he’s not above critique from his peers, in both his life and his career, he has moved beyond the point of caring too deeply.

This was a level of being that I hadn’t yet achieved as I faced the academic critiques being lobbed my way. Several professors in the folklore department expressed concerns about my journalistic style of writing. I’d worked as a reporter and as a freelance writer for six years before entering graduate school, and this was reflected in the papers I turned in. I spoke about this with Jerry a few times, telling him that I simply couldn’t adopt the academic prose and asking if this meant that I didn’t belong in graduate school.

“I’ve been told that I write like a journalist,” Jerry said.

“Was it said as a compliment?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he answered, shrugging.

“This looks like the book based on the dissertation,” one of my reviewers commented in her critique of my thesis. I remembered what Jerry said, and how he said it. I shrugged, diploma in hand. ✐ Sometimes other graduate students would describe long therapy-like sessions with their supervisors during which they sobbed out personal issues alongside their fears of academic failure—a broken rela-

22

tionship, a rejected thesis proposal, lost loves and lost funding. This is not the relationship I had with my own mentor. When I heard about these emotional tête-à-têtes, I occasionally tried to imagine a similar scenario between myself and Jerry. What would he do if I bawled in his office? I wondered.

Would he look away and distract himself with something on his computer or in one of the many piles of papers on his desk? Would he make an awkward attempt to comfort me, muttering words of encouragement, damning the man or professor or roommate who had caused my distress? Would he go into cardiac arrest from the stress of the situation? I never found out. The sob-and-share was never part of our relationship.

One summer I worked as Jerry’s teaching assistant during a fieldwork course that he runs in Harlow, U.K. There were a handful of graduate students, like myself, who were taking the upper-level version of the course, and a larger group of undergrads whose papers and field journals I marked in the evenings. We spent a lot of time on buses, heading off to field sites where we might ponder the vernacular choices of the Romans or the Tudors or the post–World War II suburban town planners.

During one of our coach rides, Jerry’s wife told a few of the graduate students how, when she was pregnant with their son, she accompanied Jerry on his biannual trip to Harlow, and how in some university town—Oxford, or maybe Cambridge—he bought so many books that he had to enlist her help in carrying them to the train station. They were late for their train and, while running on the platform, she fell, sending the books scattering.

I don’t remember how the story ended, only how it made me feel. I was uncomfortable with this window into my mentor’s domestic life. Whether the anecdote was meant as a humorous illustration of his devotion to knowledge or as a jab, I didn’t care. I realized that I wanted as little to do with his personal life as he did with mine. ✐ I never said goodbye to Jerry, at least not formally. After our last meeting, I’d stood in his doorway holding a tower of photocopied dissertations in my arms. “I’ll be back this afternoon,” I said, heading toward the graduate-studies department to fill out paperwork. It took longer than I’d

expected. Jerry needed to pick up his son from school, and when I went back the door to his office was closed. My flight left the island early the next morning.

There is no word for the free fall after the end of a significant mentorship. In folklore parlance, you might refer to this as a liminal space. It is an unknowable state of being, a kind of limbo. Henry Glassie, one of Jerry’s mentors, told him that after graduate school he would never again have the same freedom to explore his own ideas. He told Jerry not to take that time for granted.

I know this because Jerry told me this anecdote often. It’s been four years since I spent the spring and summer recording stories in Upper Amherst Cove. I’ve since had a child, moved across the country, and defended my Ph.D. I can’t imagine a future scenario in which I come up with an interesting notion and then move my entire family to an isolated region so that I can explore the idea further. It seems like a surreal dream or a movie, or, at the very least, someone else’s life. I listened to Glassie’s advice, passed on through Jerry, and I tried not to take my time as a student for granted. I think that, for the most part, I succeeded.

What I might add to that piece of wisdom is that you will also never have access to a mentor in the same way again. There may be other mentors after graduate school, but they will never be so focused on your ideas and your thoughts, the work you produce, or care as much about your future. Still, you can take comfort in the fact that life, even within the hallowed halls of academe, has a natural progression and that being a student is a liminal state. It doesn’t last forever. Eventually, it will be time to take on a new role.

Emily Urquhart is an award-winning writer and folklorist. Her first book, Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes, will be published in the spring of 2015. Her articles have appeared in Reader’s Digest and The Walrus among other publications. She lives in Victoria, B.C. with her husband and their daughter.

1. Where were you born? I was born in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh State, India, which is the seat-in-exile of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I was born in November 1985 to parents who were both refugees who had fled from Tibet.

2. At what age were you discovered to be a Rinpoche? In 1987, at the age of one year and nine months, I was recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the sixth Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche.

3. Do you know your family? Did you leave your family to join the monastery? Yes. After I was recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1987, I moved to Ling Labrang (the office and household of the Ling Rinpoche lineage), in Dharamsala. I was raised there and taken care of by members of the Ling Labrang, and from time to time my father, brothers, and sister would visit me. My mother passed away when I was just over one year old. At the age of five, I moved to Drepung Monastic University, in Mundgod Tibetan Settlement, South India. I began my monastic studies at Drepung, at the age of ten, and have since been engaged there in religious study and spiritual training under the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

4. How did your parents feel about the life that had been chosen for you? As is usually the case in Tibetan families, my parents felt very happy and honored to be blessed with the opportunity to give birth to the reincarnation of a high lama.

5. What is your relationship to your family now? Our relationship is and has always remained good, friendly, and positive.

6. What do you know about the lama who was reincarnated in you? The sixth Kyabje Yongzin Ling Rinpoche (1903–83) was the most senior tutor of His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama. He was also the ninety-seventh Gaden throne holder (the head of the Gelugpa School of Tibetan Buddhism), and one of the most learned scholars of the twentieth century. His many students included lamas, tulkus, and geshes from all the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

7. Have you ever helped find a Rinpoche? Yes, I have had this experience.

8. What is the difference between attachment and love? Attachment exaggerates or distorts the qualities of the object of attachment. It fools us and leads to suffering. Love, when it is pure, has no boundaries. It leads us to happiness. Love does not have the qualities of attachment.

9. Can you describe the difference between reincarnation and rebirth? They are the same. All beings do it. It is not only for tulkus. Every kind of being takes rebirth. Buddhism explains that the rebirth of ordinary beings—those who have not yet realized the path—is based on wherever their karma takes them.

When a highly realized being takes rebirth, it is by choice and for the benefit of all living beings, not for their own interests.

10. What is the most important aspect to convey to Westerners about Tibetan Buddhism? The practice of love and compassion. There are so many problems, and great suffering, in the world due to a lack of compassion and a lack of understanding of interdependence. The Buddhist concept of interdependence expands one’s scope of understanding and awareness beyond one’s self to the fact that everything arises from dependence upon multiple causes and conditions. That nothing exists as a single independent entity. Everything depends on something else for its existence. When we only think of our self, we neglect the interests of others and of society. The result is that we all suffer due to a limited scope of understanding. If we want a happier world, we need to work together through love and compassion.

11. Do you think there are any major misunderstandings on the part of Westerners? Yes. The images of tantra are misunderstood as sexual. One must study the sutras to understand their meaning. These images are just a symbol that can’t be viewed conventionally from a physical level. Another misunderstanding is Buddhism being viewed as a temporary solution, like therapies at a spa. Buddhism is meant to be practiced over lifetimes. Although one can make progress in one lifetime, you can’t expect to achieve everything.

12. Is there something important that the West should know about Tibet? Yes. It has preserved and propagated Buddha’s message of tolerance and nonviolence.

13. Would a Rinpoche choose a reincarnation in the West now, and if so why? A tulku’s reincarnation is about taking birth to benefit all beings. Buddhas have taken rebirth in many forms, including animals. Since the purpose of a tulku is to benefit all beings, their rebirths are not restricted to any country or race.

If a tulku takes birth in America, it is to benefit the American people through their own cultural understanding.

14. Can you explain how tulkus are recognized and how the tulku system began? Tulkus have been recognized since ancient times in India. This practice is not unique to Tibet. Before the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, there were many Buddhas.

The Tibetan institution of tulkus developed during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries as different schools of Tibetan Buddhism began to accept the possibility that exemplary figures might remain within the human world, manifesting from one lifetime to the next out of compassion to benefit all beings.

15. What would you suggest to a reader who is interested in learning more—a book to read, for example, or a place to visit?

India is a place to learn more. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has also written many books that may be helpful. They include A Simple Path: Basic Buddhist Teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life, The Four Noble Truths, and The Dalai Lama’s Book on Transformation.