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CONSCIOUS CATHEDRAL
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DARJEELING, INDIA - THE DRIVEN ARE drawn to the mountains.
Billy Jackson As the cotton-clad Tibetan saint Milarepa, having stripped himself of all vestiges of his former life, found Enlightenment in a rock-cave in the hills, so a few non-Tibetan, non-Nepali, non-Indian, non-Bhutanese, non-everything-but-Western folks find themselves one day in the foothills of the world's mightiest peaks. Compulsions differ, but the natures of these forces that induce are the same, awakening the primordial instinct these days so often dormant in the human psyche: the instinct to search.
I myself find a certain solace in the knowledge that behind the looming clouds one of the highest places on the planet touches the sky. On a clear day the dignity of Kanchenjunga, bested in height only by Everest and K2, comforts me, injects me with a certain unexplainable hope that is gratifying beyond words. Surely here, where every soaring summit is draped in wind-horse prayer flags that come alive with each zephyr, where humanity comes together so severely - the native and the tourist, the black and the white, those who sleep soundly in the grand Windamere Hotel and those who opt instead for creepy-crawly company at the Bengali Guest House - surely here, surrounded by steep slopes and glacial turrets and the mixed chants of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim faithful, something of that elusive Answer toward which the driven are driven exists, waiting to be found.
A thousand years a go, Milarepa trudged through the hills to locate a rock cavity suitable for his purposes, as directed by his root guru, the wise Marpa the Translator. Milarepa's past was marred by evil deeds that ranged in wickedness from the destruction of others' property to mass murder by black magic.
Spurred on by the shame of his terrible works, the young man sought out the great guru Marpa, and after many trials at his master's side, the student's course became clear: into the hills.
Nowadays, while certain ascetics find their path leads them in the same direction - to a place alone in the mountains - most religious devotees can accomplish their purposes well enough in the confines of a monastery: "in retreat", as they say.
I like to think that all of us in the foothills, Buddhist or not, in pursuit of religious awakening or otherwise, are "in retreat" in some fashion. Like Marpa's illustrious student in the eleventh century, all of us here find ourselves contemplating things that are only fleeting thoughts, wisps of ideas, on the plains.
The driven are many, at least more than I originally assumed. They hail from centers of civilization scattered all over the Western world, their backgrounds are diverse, and their stated reasons for coming to the hills vary more than the region's elevation. One repository of such specimens can be found in Darjeeling's Manjushree Center of Tibetan Culture, where a small group of Western driven spend four hours a day learning spoken and literary Tibetan in a moldy room under hospital lights that flicker with frequent electricity surges.
- Paul Brownell, age 29. Approximately six feet tall, Paul boasts a head that is regularly bald, but his goatee is thick with black hair, and his face delivers a ready smile. The son of a neurologist and a registered nurse-turned-homemaker, Paul grew up a baptized member of the United Church of Canada ("a liberal Lutheranism," he laughs) in Calgary, Alberta, the second-youngest of five children to whom he describes his relationship as "very close." But while his siblings chose careers in sales, with the municipality or (in the footsteps of their parents) pursUing medicine, Paul stood out, preferring philosophy at a liberal arts college to the sciences. His desire at the time was to study creative writing and, upon the suggestion of a professor at the college, he applied for a program in Colorado at Naropa University. His application was promptly rejected without even an explanatory letter.
"I was disillusioned and didn't know what I was going to do with school," said Paul, who did what most driven are apt to do: he left.
South America's Br itish Guyan a welcomed him first. Paul volunteered as part of an AIDS awareness program, at the same time striving to improve the literacy among small Amer-Indian communities in the country.
The tiny Micronesian island of Vanuatu followed, where Paul continued his humanitarian work among the locals. But a mysterious sickness called an early halt to his efforts in that land and he was quickly moved to a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, where doctors were baffled by the curious illness that prompted migraines and frequent sweats. Malaria tests came back negative.
Returning to Canada despite his condition, Paul suffered eight more months of the anonymous malady before, like a magician's disappearing assistant, it simply went away.
It was in this condition that Paul, while surfing the internet, stumbled upon Naropa University's website and found himself engaged by an advertisement there for a new program - one that combined Buddhist philosophy with social work. Despite a general lack of knowledge about Buddhism up to that point, Paul felt drawn to the program, applied ("I really had no idea what I was getting into," he says), and this time was accepted.
"I found that this program was not what I wanted at all," Paul said. But one of Naro pa's other degree options was not to be so disappointing. Soon Paul signed up for the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy program, and it was exactly what he was looking for. The two-year degree turned out to be more than academic. A mandatory one-month-long retreat became a conversion story that culminated in a meeting with a western Buddhist teacher and the making of sacred vows "to help liberate all beings." The philosophy he studied at school had become personal, a religion, but soon after taking his vows "everything began to crumble," he said. "I was stressed out, I was disillusioned with school and all I wanted to do was practice meditation."
Certainly one of the young man's most important realizations came to him during this particular struggle: that both meditation and study are essential to spiritual progression.
It's only proper, then, that Paul's heroes are two Buddhist masters who epitomized the "incredible synthesis of academic study and practice," as he puts it. Naropa was a learned Indian saint who combined university study with over a decade of meditation in the jungle. Paul's own guru (and his other hero), Khenpo Rinpoche, was in retreat for twelve years (at one point even sealed up in a cave) before Chinese aggression forced his escape from Tibet. This motivated a great period of study; now Khenpo Rinpoche is one of the most learne d scholars in the Tibetan Buddhist world.
And like his guru before him, Paul Brownell finds himself in the mountains, practicing dharma and driven toward a future that is, as yet, uncertain. Strong candidates for roles in his post-Darjeeling life include the mastery of the Tibetan language (not to mention Japanese and Sanskrit), prolonged meditation, further philosophical studies, and perhaps even a family ("I love kids").
For now, however, Paul's place is in the foothills of the mountains from which his guru fled, overlooking the vast country where Naropa reached his own spiritual heights.
- At 13, an Australian Catholic girl from the Snowy Mountains could never have dreamed that she would one day live with a Tibetan family in India - and as a Buddhist nun, to boot. But at 14, that girl's world fell apart and anything might have seemed possible.
Sister Yeshe (her Tibetan name, by which she prefers to be known) is young, only 26 years old, but starting from that singular, reality-shaking event eleven years ago, she has lived what many would consider two lifetimes' worth of experience. And it all began when her father passed away tragically from cancer, sending her into a spiritual spiral that left her feeling empty and desolate.
"When he died my whole world was shattered," Sister Yeshe said. "Everything I knew fell away. I started questioning: why am I here, why am I suffering?"
It was in this condition (which she frankly describes as "quite suicidal") that she - one of the driven from the beginning - left.
Dropping out of her Catholic school for girls, Sister Yeshe was at a loss for an explanation of life. So, clothed in her mother's bed-sheet ("as a sari"), the teenager wandered as a hippie, hitchhiking around Australia doing what the driven are apt to do: search.
"I tried boys, drugs, everything," Sister Yeshe said.
But none of them satisfied her thirst for the real answers.
The hippie life was an escape, but it presented no destination.
Thus her efforts became more and more radical, her hopes grounded in finding an explanation for life in the extreme.
"I lived in a teepee for a while. I camped out in the national park for a while. I was like a nomad, you could say, and in my travels I kept hearing the word India, India. ... 'India is where you'll find the meaning of life'."
Like Siddartha Gautama himself, who, upon witnessing pain and suffering for the first time in his life, resolved to find the Answers, Sister Yeshe had become a wanderer, and her wandering led her to Buddhism's birthplace, that country teeming with people and heavy with history and shrouded in a blinding fusion of myth and reality: India.
At 17, she left for the subcontinent."When I came to India I felt more at home [there] and in Nepal than I did in my own country," Sister Yeshe said. "I've always felt very out of place in my own culture." The reason for this baffling phenomenon seemed finally within Yeshe's reach when, walking past a bookstore, she noticed in the window the title Reborn in the West. The book presented the theory that Tibetan lamas are increasingly being reborn in the West now that atheistic Communists administer the once-religious nation of Tibet. Here, perhaps, was one of the Answers for which she was seeking.
Sister Yeshe recalled thinking: maybe I was reborn in the West. And she fell in love with Buddhism. "It's been my faithful companion ever since," she said.
Perhaps the words of one of Sister Yeshe's many poems express her feelings most ably:
In the darkness of existenceImmediately she felt an urge to devote her life to this new path, a path that had seemingly provided some answers. "Right away" she desired the robe, but realized t hat her life experience was too limited to become a nun so soon.
I found a light
In the heart of pain
I found something bright
Stumbling through things
Confusion at an end
All that was frost
Is now born again?"I wasn't ready," she admitted.
Returning to Australia a new woman, she found a job (her first) helping a Tibetan Lama run his Dharma Centre in Sydney. The nine-to-five routine only strengthened her desire to become a nun, while her understanding of her newly adopted religion increased with five years of instruction at the Dharma Centre. When a visiting Lama came to Australia and she felt convinced that she was ready, Sister Yeshe - then 23 years old - took her vows.
"Then my life changed again," Sister Yeshe said. Taking sacred vows is a salient adjustment in and of itself, but even the simple act of wearing robes brought its own new - and unexpected - challenges.
"People don't see you anymore, they just see the robes," Sister Yeshe explained, "so their expectations of you skyrocket. People in the West don't know what to do with monks and nuns, even Buddhists. I had to carve my own niche, and I found myself nomadic once again." And nomadic she certainly was, living in garden sheds (she spent months in one of them), in Korean (Theravada) temples, and sometimes in her mother's house. But, haphazard habitations aside, as a newly ordained nun, Sister Yeshe by no means disengaged herself from the world. Her involvement with the community stretched from working with HIV patients to teaching yoga, from instructing prisoners in meditation to writing her own autobiogr aphy/introduction to Buddhism (published by HarperCollins under the title Everyday Enlightenment).
Such pursuits complimented her mostly contemplative life. Almost four years of such activity passed. Then India began calling again. So Sister Yeshe went to the world's highest mountains to learn Tibetan and study philosophy. Her drive: "I find the West spiritually poverty-stricken. I feel my mission is to make monastic life available in the West."
One thousand three hundred years ago, a woman named Yeshe Tsogyal was forced into a marriage with Tibet's king despite her wishes to be a spiritual practitioner. When the king invited the revered Indian saint Padmasambhava to Tibet, Yeshe Tsogyal was given to the guru as a consort. She practiced dharma with intense dedication and became one of Padmasambhava's chief disciples. A testament that women ("who have often been marginalized in Buddhism," says Sister Yeshe) can also attain Enlightenment, Yeshe Tsogyal's life, even as a disciple, was fraught with difficulty. Once, she was gang-raped by bandits, but her high level of spirituality allowed her to turn the rape - one of man's lowest impulses - int o a wonderful teaching opportunity during which she actually gave blessings to her one-time attackers.More than millennium later, an Australian nun took upon herself the designation of Yeshe and, like her namesake before her, found the strength to turn a seemingly unbearable situation (her father's death) into the springboard event to her attainment of peace. And like Yeshe Tsogyal, Sister Yeshe practiced in the world for a time, then went to the hills.
I am not a Buddhist.But being in the hills, talking with Paul and Sister Yeshe and Phil and Constanzo and Maxim (some of whom the reader is, of course, yet to meet), I am reminded that mountains embody a spirituality not only for Tibetan Buddhists but also for Christians, and especially for members of my own church - the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
Abraham was commanded - as a test that symbolized the sacrifice of God's own Son - to offer up his son Isaac as a sacrifice on a mountain, in the end prevented from doing so by an angel who appeared to him there.
The Lord of Hosts commanded Moses, on the sacred, dusty slopes of Mount Sinai, to "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is ho ly ground".
Later, God's law was delivered to Israel from atop the mountain.
Almost two thousand years later, Jesus Christ himself suffered in prayer, bleeding from every pore, on a mount: The Mount of Olives. The next day the Savior was lifted up and crucified, giving his life for all mankind on another hill: Golgotha.
To Mormons, particularly, mountains hold a singular sacredness. At times when poverty or emergency make the building of a temple impossible, God has allowed the holiest of ordinances to be performed on a mountain. Isaiah prophesied that in the latter days "the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the tops of the mountains"; when Brigham Young and his ragged group of pioneers entered the Salt Lake valley in 1847, flanked by the Rocky Mountains, that modern-day Moses drove his walking stick into the moisture-less earth and proclaimed, "Here we will build the temple of our God." The "mountain of the Lord's house" is, to me and nearly twelve million other Latter-day Saints, a phrase that stands for the temple, which, in the words of one of our apostles, is "the most holy of any place of worship on earth."
Deep in the heart of Calcutta there is a place where old men and women, indigent and physically unable to take care of themselves, go to die together. At one time the place was a hotel for Hindu pilgrims visiting the nearby temple of Kali, but now new sorts of pilgrims can be found here - the kind that are setting off for that most holy of pilgrimages - death - and the kind drawing on the power of compassion to aid the dying in their journey.The main room is lined with hospital-like beds, about a hundred in total, and partitioned so that the beds on one side are filled with aged, penniless, failing women and the beds on the other are occupied by aged, penniless, failing men. This is the late Mother Theresa's Home for the Dying Destitute and among the volunteers working there - bathing, dressing, feeding, massaging, and otherwise interacting with India's poorest, most pitiable souls - could once be found a young man from Sheffield, England.
For almost three months, the 23-year-old fed his patients at eight o'clock in the morning, then bathed them despite some protest ("obviously it's necessary, so they can have some dignity," he says). Many had to be carried to the bath, then carried back. He put clean clothes on them, administered medicine to them, fed them lunch, gave them basic physical therapy.
"These are people whose thighs fit inside your thumb and index finger," he said. And though "time flies when you're there", in the end Phil Beecroft needed space, some time to think about what he had just experienced, and a place to ponder.
Where to go?
Like the driven before him and the driven to come, the answer seemed obvious: to the mountains.
Phil has been a postman, a factory worker, a waiter - ("Just dead-end jobs, I suppose you could say," he says) - and studied sculpting for three years at university. But from the age of 14, when he found himself intrigued by books on Tibet and India, the boy from Sheffield wanted to travel. "The romance of the nomad lifestyle" appealed to Phil, who didn't want to struggle as a professional sculptor and decided that he would save up and travel for two or three years.
"I started my job knowing that I would quit," Phil said. "It was just a matter of time." The avid reader-turned-intrepid traveler was still drawn to India and Tibet, but the enticement of exotic adventure had been somewhat replaced by the trademark instinct of the driven, so Phil left to search.
"Spiritual traditions that have developed over thousands of years" and "mystics" and "great people", "balance" and "exploration" and "an impulse, but I can't say what it is" - these all played a part in driving Phil to purchase a one-way ticket to Delhi and, finally, to board that plane.
After spending time in various locations throughout India (and finding out, first-hand, the meaning of "getting ripped off", once paying 9,000 rupees for a room that should have cost 200), Phil found himself in Calcutta where the "dirty, horrible place" constrained him to seek out a temporary asylum from the mass of humanity in India's brand name city. He hopped on a train to Siliguri, a town just south of the foothills, and during the ride met a monk who suggested he stay at his friend's monastery near Darjeeling. The advice proved fruitful, for Phil ended up not only staying at the monastery but also teaching English as well to twenty grateful monks in residence there.
"One day all the monks were getting ready to go somewhere and I followed them," Phil recalled. "They were going to Darjeeling, where the Dalai Lama was giving teachings, which I heard."
Unexpectedly crossing paths with the Dalai Lama made an impression on the young man, who immediately decided to apply the former's instruction on compassion into his own life. He returned to Calcutta and for two weeks worked at the Home for Destitute and Dying. Following a brief interlude, during which he roamed about Sikkim visiting temples, villages, and Buddhist sacred sites, he returned for the third time to Calcutta. For two more months he volunteered at Mother Theresa's.
Now Phil is in the mountains, learning Tibetan and searching for answers. "Maybe I'm starting something that will be really interesting to me," he said. "What people look for is a sense of direction. I haven't fo und it yet." But here, i n the hills, he just might.
Constanzo Allione, 24, is an only son, though he would have had a twin if she had lived more than a few months after birth. The child of an Italian documentary filmmaker ("from Siberian Shamanism to Beat Poets to Bob Marley," he says of the broad spectrum of his father's work) and his mother, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Costanzo was a practicing Buddhist until the age of 14, when a Colorado boarding school, far from his New York home, effectively put an end to his religious ways. "The politics of Buddhism turned me off, plus I was more interested in girls," he said. But a childhood spent under the tutelage of his mother, one of the first Western women to become a nun under the 16th Karmapa and author of Women of Wisdom (Penguin), is not easily forgotten. So when the tax of college life grew almost unbearable ("I was breaking up with my girlfriend and my life was moving too fast," he says) Costanzo naturally turned to the one permanent source of spirituality in his life: his mother."I asked my mother for some instruction on some very simple [Buddhist] practice, concen trating on the breath," he said.
Scarcely a month later, the pressured student paid a visit to his mother at the Tara Mandala Buddhist Retreat Center in Colorado and met a Tibetan lama there who was destined to change the course of his life. "In that instant of meeting him," he recounted, "I felt devotion like I've never felt with anyone else in a matter of seconds, saying hello, having him touch my head."
That weekend Costanzo "took refuge" ("kind of like the Christian baptism for Buddhists," he explains). Even in the midst of a new job at a laboratory in Baltimore[MD. USA] , where the recent graduate used bacterial phages as an alternative to antibiotics, the weekend in Colorado had motivated him to practice Buddhism "full on". Even before taking up the position, he requested - and was granted - a six-month leave to visit Tibet and India. Unfortunately, September 11th 2001 came between him and his overseas dream.
Instead of international adventures, the boy from Rome decided to journey through the United States with his girlfriend. The period was bittersweet, culminating not in three months of retreat in a solitary cabin, as planned, but rather in a breakup after only thirty days.
Baltimore could only contain the newly re-invigorated Buddhist for so long, and within four months he had left the lab and returned to Colorado. He secured a job at the dharma center as land manager, running work crews and building cabins. For two years, Costanzo did nothing with his degree in molecular genetics, opting instead for Buddhist practice. Inaugurating those two years, however, was his meeting with Paloma ("dove" in Spanish). "It was love at first sight," he said. "She introduced herself and we kind of ran away from society to live together at Tara Mandala."
More recently, he was the one running, and with the generous support of Paloma, he enrolled as a student at Manjushree in Darjeeling to learn Tibetan. Costanzo plans further travel in India and Tibet, but his main reason for picking up the new and very difficult language is to better understand Buddhism. Energetically he explained to me the concepts of his philosophy on life, peppered with Buddhist terminology and the scientific jargon of his university days. Despite his convictions, however, Constanzo nonetheless gives the impression of one who is searching. One of the driven.
"I probably want to study some type of nature medicine in the future," Constanzo said. "But before that I want to do a long retreat. That's my immediate plan and it's hard to say anything beyond that." The Italian-American hasn't ruled out a family, though he has also given serious to thought to a hermit's life, "maybe even becoming a monk".
Here, in the hills, Costanzo longs for the opportunity to go on retreat, like his 18th century idol Jigme Lingpa, a Tibetan saint and reputedly the reincarnation of the great dharma-king Trisong Detsen. A great scholar, at the age of 21 Jigme Lingpa "realized the nature of his mind" and began a three-year retreat, high in the mountains, in complete solitude. In the seclusion of icy mountain peaks that loomed like sentinels guarding the mind's most sublime secrets, Jigme Lingpa saw visions.
This morning the sky was clear, cloudless, for the first time since my arrival in the hillside town of Darjeeling. That meant that the mountains weren't invisible.
I left my house and rounded the hill, finally coming to a bench that was part of what looked like a bus stop despite the fact that no motor vehicles were allowed here; probably a remnant of British influence. Taking a seat on the old bench, I looked out and was greeted by a chain of snow-capped peaks that stretched right and left to the horizon, like Titans.
Kanchenjunga dwarfed them all, rising up like the mother Titan spewing swirling trails of snow and mist from her summit. The view was spectacular, made more glorious by the realization that any one of these peaks in front of me was taller than the highest mountain in t he Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, or the Urals. In those vegetation-free valleys, carved out by millions of years of glacial movement and flanked by protruding rock and boulders as big as hotels, one can get about as close to the sky as possible and still be on the ground.
In the mountains, heaven is close.
Maxim De Zitter got high on LSD and was subsequently moved by his psychedelic visions.Thus began a search, as one of the driven, for answers to the meaning of life. Raised more by the streets than his fish-selling parents during the week, and more by his grandparents on the weekends, Maxim grew up a member of a strong Catholic family in cities across Belgium, the Flemish son of simple, uneducated stock.
"At some age you start doubting," he said of his mid-teen years when he began to feel distanced from his parents ("when you are a teenager you start hating your parents for everything they do," he says) and then he questioned Catholicism most vehemently. "At about age fourteen, fifteen, I became very skeptical. I didn't believe anymore."
The boy's spiritual leanings - or lack thereof - set him apart from his sister and only sibling, a girl he describes as "normal", meaning she "doesn't question all these things." To this day, tension exists between brother and sister. Said Maxim: "I think she envies me because she married young and is stuck and I am doing all these things."
It was during these teenage years of change that Maxim fell in love with experimental poetry. Fascinated by the freedom it allowed, the 15-year old knew that his destiny was to be a poet. "Something like hit me in the face and I started writing poetry then," he said.
But poetry wasn't the only medium through which the young Flemish experimented. Art of all kinds also found a place in his life, not to mention drugs. At 17, a high dose of LSD led to his leaving his body and "seeing things" in a sort of bliss. Soon afterwards, another high dose left him chained by paranoia, scared, like a child.
"My salvation was very dualistic," he tried to explain of these two events. "First I experienced a huge bliss, then it was like a hell."
Feeling isolated, finding no solace with friends, struggling with "serious mental problems" as he puts it, it wasn't until the age of 21 - after graduating with a degree in the arts - that he walked out of the library with a book in his hands: a book by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama. Poring over its pages, the young man read exactly what he himself had experienced during the drug-induced hallucinations of his past. This is it, he thought, I will become a Budd hist.
Initially attracted to Zen Buddhism over the Tibetan version's myriad deities and wrathful gods and multitudinous prayers, Maxim visited a Tibetan Buddhist center in Belgium some months later - a visit that would not conclude until he had finished ten days of meditation. "It w as wonderful," he said, and it was later, during a retreat in an old Chinese restaurant in Austria, that he met his guru and his "career of being a Buddhist" gained direction.
"My teacher was a wild yogi," Maxim said, "not like the smiling, gentle Buddhism that Westerners think of." As contradictory as it may initially ring, the unruly lama taught through confusion. "That was his way of practicing," Maxim said. "My guru was," he explained, "the crazy-wisdom emanation of Padmasambhava."
Despite the guru's unorthodox ways, or perhaps because of them, Maxim felt he had found the path leading to truth. Maxim went to the mountains.
Studying Tibetan, the Belgian hopes not only to better understand religious texts but also translate them as an extension of his anthropological interests.
"So many great traditions in Tibet are absolutely unknown in the West," he said. "These books are just laying there by the tens of thousands, probably never touched by any Westerner."
After six months in Darjeeling, he plans to live with a Tibetan family in Nepal, learning th e language and practicing Buddhism as "a way to give back to my teacher, who has given me so much." After that, his plans are far less concrete. "I absolutely don't want a family or any fixed relationship," he said. "I have all these things I want to do - long retreats - and if you have a serious relationship or a child then you can't do that."
Inwardly, he explains, his pursuit is to develop complete detachment.
"I don't have the feeling I will ever have a real life," he admitted. "Maybe I'll live in India the rest of my life. That's the decision I took, I mean, I made this connection with my guru, and that's part of being a yogi. It's like signing a contract. But still, sometimes I really wonder, what am I doing?"
Thus, despite all of his findings, the Belgian is still searching ("the goal is the path," he says), and as such he finds himself in the hills, like the much-loved Tibetan saint Padmasambhava, who Maxim admires with an almost worshipful devotion. To Nyingmapas, Maxim explains, Padmasambhava occupies a higher place than even Siddartha Gautama. He it was who left India and came to the mountains, to Tibet, taking Buddhism there in the 8th century and establishing it for good.
Later the Nyingma sect, along with Tibetan Buddhism in general, went through a period of degeneration, followed by regeneration, but despite the new, more popular sects springing up all over the Land of Snows, the Nyingmapas could always claim to be the oldest, the first, the school of Padmasambhava. Like numerous Indian saints after him, Padmasambhava left the plains to teach and meditate in the mountains.
And that, it seems, is an example being followed by a young student from Belgium, one thousand three hundreds years later.
My path has led me from the sweltering plains of Delhi to the ancient kingdom of Ladakh, from Nelson Mandela's election in South Africa to the desolation of the Ethio-Eritrean war. I've visited Buddhist centers in Singapore, interviewed almost one hundred refugees between Dharamsala and Salt Lake City, organized charity dinners at Marriott hotels, put together symposiums at major universities, and once I even ran one thousand five hundreds miles (59 days) from San Francisco to Colby, Kansas [USA] carrying the Tibetan flag in my weary hand.I've debated with the Chinese ambassador to the United States, given speeches on Burmese national television, and seen my newborn son receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama's niece. I've been a missionary in Poland, for two yeas speaking nothing but Polish and wearing a suit and tie and nametag and sharing my deepest spiritual bel iefs with anyone who would listen on the street. I've founded an NGO and taken it apart again, I've built houses for the poor in the Philippines, and I've organized pen-pal relationships between rich Utah schoolchildren and destitute orphans - all AIDS victims - in Zimbabwe. I've directed crowds of hundreds in rural Ethiopian villages, volunteered at refugee camps in South Africa, addressed a packed auditorium in the Singapore National Museum, and once, on the friendship highway between Nepal and Tibet, I yelled "Free Tibet" to the border guard on the China side.
Through all of this, experiences the world over, working with thousands of people in calamitous conditions from Africa to Asia to Eastern Europe to the United States, I have always been driven. And no matter where I was involved, or with what, I have always been driven here, to the hills: the mountains of India and Tibet.
I've never been able to explain it, though I've been asked to try hundreds of times.
At first, perhaps, the exotic nature of it all, the mountains, were the magnets that sucked me in. But that is no longer the case. My obsession with Tibet isn't about the Great Game, or Shangri-la, or levitating monks in a peace-loving land; I have studied Tibetan history vigorously and I know better.
Then why am I learning Tibetan?
Because I am a student of Tibetan history, because I must do my part in preserving a culture that has been scheduled for extermination, because I wish to expand my horizons, because I want to free Tibet? In all honesty, I don't know. I'm driven to. There. That's my answer.
I'm searching, too - not necessarily for the great spiritual answers but for a greater understanding of the world and what I can do to make it better - or, in the words of Costanzo Allione, "to benefit sentient beings".
And here, facing down Kanchenjunga - a part of the same range where Milarepa reached Enlightenment, where Khenpo Rinpoche spent twelve years in meditation, where Yeshe Tsogyal became Tibetan Buddhism's most famed female, where Jigme Lingpa "realized the nature of his mind", and where Padmasambhava went to bring dharma to a benighted land - I just might stumble upon something.
BILLY JACKSON was born in San Francisco, CA, but would spend most of his childhood and early adult life in foreign countries, including Australia, India, South Africa, Singapore, Poland, and Ethiopia. He is the founder of the Relief Alliance, a 100% non-profit NGO that organizes and carries out large-scale humanitarian projects and human rights campaigns the world over. He double-majored in Asian Studies and Geographic Information Systems at Brigham Young University. This is his sixth article for The World's Magazine.
