Helen Tworkov: Dying Every Day

Helen Tworkov, co-author of In Love with the World with Mingyur Rinpoche, sits down with James Shaheen, Tricycle’s publisher and editor, to discuss how she helped her teacher tell his story, the near-death experience that transformed his life and teachings, and how seeing the small deaths we experience each day can help us alleviate our fears of dying. They also discuss Tworkov's role as founding editor, the origins of Tricycle, and how the Western Buddhist landscape has changed over time.

Transcript

Hello,

And welcome to Tricycle Talks.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle,

The Buddhist Review.

In this episode,

We have a very special guest,

Tricycle's founding editor and my good friend,

Helen Torkoff.

We're going to take a look at the history of the magazine,

But first we're going to discuss her latest project,

A new book that she co-wrote with her teacher,

The Tibetan Buddhist meditation master,

Yangi Minjur Rinpoche.

The book is called,

In Love with the World,

A Monk's Journey Through the Bardo's of Living and Dying.

It tells the fascinating story of how Minjur Rinpoche sneaked out of his monastery to go on a four-year wandering retreat,

Leaving behind his comfortable and privileged existence to live as a traveling yogi,

Homeless and begging for alms.

Helen and I will talk about her teacher's journey,

How she helped him tell his story,

And the near-death experience at the heart of the book.

Before we begin the interview,

Let's listen to a brief reading from Helen.

So here's a paragraph that takes place at the very beginning of the book.

And he's standing in the Gaya station.

It's about an hour after he's actually snuck out of his own monastery.

And he's already beginning to feel a lot of discomfort with where he is,

Being alone,

Never having been outside in the world by himself.

And he says,

Quote,

I had never imagined that it would be easy to beg or to sleep on the street.

I had chosen this type of retreat for its difficulties.

I had studied the beggars that lined the road to the Mahabodhi temple and envisioned myself among them.

I had projected my reactions to strangers who avoided my alms bowl.

In my imagination,

I sometimes met their indifference with genuine concern for their cold-heartedness.

At other times,

I responded with anger.

I had wondered how far I would go to get food.

I had pictured rooting through garbage like a wild pig.

I was a vegetarian and ate few sweets.

But for the past few weeks,

I had seen myself chomping down meat and savoring discarded cookie crumbs.

I had even wondered if hunger would induce me to eat raw fish guts like the Indian adept tilopa.

Darrell Bock That was quite beautiful.

Thank you for joining us,

Helen Torkow.

Helen Torkow Thank you for having me.

Darrell Bock So tell us a little bit about this book you wrote with Minjur Rinpoche.

What would you like the reader to take away from it?

Helen Torkow Well,

The book is his own memoir,

And it covers a period of several weeks during which he left his own monastery to go and be a wandering monk.

So he went through this transition of being a very esteemed,

Very protected abbot and meditation teacher.

And he left this comfort zone to go out on the street and live as a sadhu,

Live as a beggar on the street,

And to sleep on the floor of the forest and of the villages and beg for food.

And that's the first part of the book is his leave-taking,

Why he does that,

And why he engages in what he calls an ego-suicide mission,

To try to dissolve the outer layers of his identity in order to expose and reveal and work with a deeper level of reality.

And then several weeks into this very extraordinary experience for him,

He actually eats something that's very bad,

And he almost dies.

Then he has a near-death experience.

So there's these two ways of dying that the book goes over,

Eco-death,

The death of the self,

Of the small self,

The self that's identified with all the labels that we're attached to,

And physical death.

So between those two aspects of dying,

The takeaway is to see how we're dying all the time,

To really reimagine what dying and being reborn in this lifetime looks like day after day,

Minute after minute.

And the takeaway is that this thing that we hold out for in the future,

This fear of death that we have,

Actually can become something that we can be comfortable with by recognizing how it's happening all the time.

It's not this big monumental iconic thing that happens once at the end of our lives.

Well,

How does it happen all the time?

I mean,

I've heard you use the phrase dying every day.

How is it that we die every day,

Or every moment even?

Well,

You could take a very obvious example,

Which is used in the teachings,

That when you go to sleep at night,

There's actually a very strong parallel between what happens in physical death.

There's the dissolution of the elements,

The dissolution of the senses.

The conceptual mind is released through that process of dissolution.

And so you have dreams that take you into realms that you do not go into in your waking life,

But they are coming from your own mind.

But you could consider that a kind of dying every day.

That's the sort of more obvious one.

There's also a sense of the beginning of a relationship,

The end of a relationship,

Things that change,

That transform,

Falling apart and going into a period of uncertainty,

Which could happen over a period of weeks.

It could happen in a moment.

It could happen in a flash.

You're walking down the street and suddenly you have that sense that a hole opens up underneath you when you fall through.

And I think we've often had those experiences,

Sometimes associated with trauma,

Emotional upheavals that are very shocking for us,

But they're not unusual.

First of all,

Just a technical question.

What do Tibetan Buddhists mean when they refer to dissolution of the elements?

Well,

The idea is that,

And it's certainly not unique to Tibetan Buddhism,

But the same elements that make up the universe,

Earth,

Fire,

Water,

Space,

Air,

Are the same elements that are in our bodies.

These are the components of all of life,

Of all of earth.

So the dissolution refers to that.

And actually,

Even though the Tibetan texts that deal with death and dying,

What we call the Bardo texts,

Are very explicit about this dissolution,

The same description that they give you is a description that just about any hospice nurse can give you.

They see it.

If you've been with dying people,

I've been with people who have died,

You can see the heaviness at the point at which the dying person could no longer lift their arm or bring a glass of water to their lips.

You see what happens.

One way of understanding is the fire element leaves when the lips become so parched and family members or nurses will put packs of ice around someone's lips to help alleviate that parchedness or the skin will become very,

Very dry.

All of these are things that hospice nurses know very,

Very well.

If we look at the examples you gave of countless small deaths in our daily life,

How do we use those to prepare for the end of our lives?

I think there's two ways of understanding it.

One is you can see it as preparation for a future event,

Or you can just drop the future part and just understand it as a daily life experience.

Now of course,

Whatever you work with in your daily life today is going to change your relationship to it tomorrow.

We could call that karma or we could just leave that word out for now,

But that's how it happens is that you actually are seeding what happens in the future by what you do today.

So if you can become comfortable with disillusion,

With having the mind fall apart,

If you can stay in that space instead of trying to grasp on to the conceptual mind that you're so familiar with,

Then you could see that as a,

Quote,

Preparation for our physical death,

But you could also see it as a preparation for tomorrow or for the next hour.

You know,

Through the course of the book,

Amintra Rinpoche has to let go again and again and again.

It's about leaving everything behind,

And he comes up against an attachment,

And he has to let that go.

His comforts,

His status,

His very identity goes up in smoke.

So I'm just wondering how being so close to this process as he told it to you moved you or did it function like a teaching?

Was it an extraordinary experience to be able to do this?

Well,

It was certainly an extraordinary experience to work with him on a book.

This is our second book together,

And it's always extraordinary for me to be around him,

And I can never quite believe my good fortune in being in that position.

In the book,

Rinpoche talks about letting go is a form of dying.

That in itself is a form of dying.

Could I do what he did?

No,

Of course not.

Absolutely not.

I don't know anybody who could,

But I think the point he tries to make in the book is it's not going from,

Let's say,

A middle-class comfort into a street person zone.

It's more about working with whatever your attachment is.

That's the letting go.

That's the dying.

That's the capacity to be willing to allow something to be newly born,

Which it cannot be until you acknowledge the death.

Only with acknowledging the dying can you allow for new birth or regeneration,

Renewal in your own life.

And that's,

I think,

What he's trying to talk about for the average reader.

He's not suggesting anywhere along the line that any one of us give up our lives and take to the streets.

That would be unrealistic for us.

After all,

Not only was he in India,

But he had been training for 30 years before he did this.

He had a lot of confidence for very good reason in his capacity to deal with the very obstacles that he invited.

Okay,

That's an interesting way to put it,

The obstacles that he invited.

Do you want to say something about that?

Because it's not like anyone required him to leave a life of comfort and privilege.

He's a high-born llama.

He's had attendance around him all his life.

He has every comfort.

And yet he chose to do this.

Can you say something about why one might choose to do this?

You talk about putting your feet to the fire.

He chose to do something that was difficult for him.

And he needed to figure out what that was.

Now,

Of course,

Becoming homeless and living on the streets as a yogi is very much part of his tradition.

This was not something he made up,

Like he had this bright idea,

Or he watched some fantasy movie when he was a kid and thought,

Wow,

Would this be fun?

This is how his own Kagyu tradition started.

It started with Tilopa.

It starts with a guy who's living on the street or living in a village on the banks of a river,

Eating fish guts that have been thrown to him by the fishermen.

And then his hero,

As every Tibetan kid hero,

Is Milarepa,

Who lived in the mountains without any clothes on,

Without boots and slept in caves.

And so what the takeaway for him from these stories is that one's physical comfort is not dependent on circumstances,

That one cultivates the mind to have ease in the world,

Ease and happiness in the world.

And these were his boyhood heroes,

As they are for every Tibetan child.

So for him,

He was looking for something that would push his own boundaries.

And that's really the takeaway in the book is what are our boundaries?

What can we do in a daily basis that pushes us into being uncomfortable so that we can drop some of our own identities,

Some of our own fixed habits?

So much of what in Buddhism,

When we talk about the suffering,

Buddha talks about the suffering of the mind.

The mind that he's talking about is the mind that gets fixated on its own identity and starts to repeat the same things again and again and again and again.

Even though we can see the repetition,

We often don't know how to break it.

And this is something that Rinpoche talks about a lot in this book.

So that's what he was trying to do.

That's why he calls it an eco-suicide mission,

Some way of working with his own level of discomfort.

Now the fact is,

When he first leaves,

His discomfort is much greater than he initially anticipated.

Yeah,

Well,

This is somebody who never spent time alone.

He had attendance everywhere he went.

Even when he crossed the street,

There was somebody crossing the street with him.

So it is true that it is in his tradition to go forth,

To leave all the comforts at home and be a wandering yogi.

And yet it isn't that common,

Is it?

No,

It's definitely not that common,

Although he himself has four main teachers.

One is alive today,

Thaisitha Rinpoche,

But the other three have all died.

And one of those three was Nischal Ken Rinpoche,

Who Mincha Rinpoche absolutely,

Totally adores to this day when he speaks about him as his face just lights up.

And Nischal Ken Rinpoche did live on the streets for a certain period of his life.

The big difference there is that Nischal Ken Rinpoche grew up in great poverty and did not have the comforts that Mincha Rinpoche did.

And if he was living on the street or when he lived on the streets of Calcutta,

If he went without food for two,

Three days in a row,

That would not have been his first experience of hunger for Mincha Rinpoche,

It was.

Right.

So,

You know,

You talk about the example he sets.

Naturally,

Most of us are not going to leave the comforts at home to wander on the streets.

How might a practitioner or one of his students do something inspired by his example that is within their capacity or limits?

Well,

There's a couple of different ways.

A very common practice that sometimes Tibetan teachers give their students and I think Zen teachers do,

In fact,

I've even read stories of some of the Benedictine fathers who did this with their novitiates,

Is you give them something to do that is contrary to routine.

One of my first Tibetan teachers told me,

When you walk to work every day,

How do you walk to work every day?

Well,

I took the same route.

He said,

Change up the route.

Just walk a different way.

If you pick up your coffee cup with your right hand,

Just try picking it up with your left hand.

Do something to break your fixed mind,

To create a disruption of patterns so you can watch yourself more clearly and try to create openings for yourself.

Now,

Those are very,

Very minor.

We could pick up other things.

Do something that's very frightening.

I started taking horseback riding lessons about 15 years ago.

It was kind of scary.

But there are a lot of things that I'm scared of that I would never do.

I would never do bungee jumping or I would never jump out of a plane or whatever that's called.

Oh,

Really?

Skydiving.

Skydiving.

There are a lot of things that I wouldn't— I can see you skydiving.

There's a lot of things that I wouldn't think of doing.

But there are things that you sometimes just say,

Well,

I'm afraid of this.

And instead of saying,

I'm afraid of it,

Therefore I won't do it.

What happens if we say,

I'm really afraid of this,

Therefore I will do it?

You know,

That brings something else up.

I mean,

In popular discourse,

The discussion of safety,

The value of safety and safe spaces and so forth seem to be antithetical to be putting yourself out there in circumstances that frighten you.

In fact,

It seems putting your feet to the fire means being in a very unsafe space or a space that feels unsafe to you.

How do you understand safety?

Well,

I think at some level I have a very conventional sense of a space that feels protective and it's an aid to feeling at ease and feeling comfortable.

So if you're in a meditation hall,

For example,

And you feel safe,

It hopefully allows the mind to relax and let go of its own conceptual fixity.

And all of this is a kind of an aid to opening up,

To opening up the heart,

Opening up the mind.

And in that sense,

I think it can be very helpful.

I think sometimes I'm reading about things these days where safety feels like it's a kind of code word for being uncomfortable.

It's not so much about safety as about trying to manipulate one's environment.

And that has the potential to become a kind of counterproductive,

At least in terms of one's Buddhist practice,

Because the Buddha is very clear on something.

Your circumstances and conditions are going to be difficult for you your entire life.

That's just the way life is.

People that you love will die.

Pets that you love will die.

Oh,

Don't say that.

And jobs that you love might end.

Friendships you feel betrayed by.

This is what life happens.

And these circumstances keep churning this up over and over and over again.

So what the Buddhist message about that is,

The nature of suffering is you cannot control the outside circumstances,

But you can do a lot to control or change or transform how you relate to those circumstances.

So if you're trying to create an entire universe for yourself,

You're always going to feel safe.

That's a kind of a hopeless situation.

And it feels like it's a setup for creating a lot of anguish.

So I think it kind of depends on intention and circumstances.

I don't think there's one answer fits all here.

But I tell you that I did recently hear of two different examples,

Where somebody who had been accused of sexual impropriety,

And I honestly don't know the whole story,

Whether it was whether the case was proved or disproved,

Or there was a legal issue or not,

But it was somebody who had been accused of sexual impropriety.

And in two different cases,

The Sangha,

We're talking about a Buddhist situation,

The Sangha of that person denied their access to coming to the meditation hall.

This is,

To my mind,

Very problematic.

It's possible that there were people in the room who felt very uncomfortable with this person's presence.

I understand that.

But the Bodhisattva vow is to try to help all sentient beings,

And that includes the perpetrator and the victim.

It includes both.

The whole point of the Bodhisattva vow is you don't pick and choose.

Picking and choosing is just part of the conceptual game that we all get caught in.

So the idea that a meditation hall would reject people for that,

I mean,

Unless they're obviously not running around wielding knives,

Although the Buddha himself,

As we know,

One of his disciples was Angulimala,

Who had killed 999 people.

And he becomes a member of the Sangha.

So that's,

I could see if I was in that Sangha with somebody who had killed 999 people,

I might go to the administration and say,

You know,

I feel a little uptight here.

I feel unsafe.

I feel unsafe.

One of the things is that Meentempeche lives in such a rarefied world.

He's royalty,

Basically.

He has people deferring to him,

Waiting on him,

Serving him.

He has attendance.

How are we to relate to that and follow him as an example?

The example to follow has nothing to do with class or status.

The example to follow is giving up what you're attached to.

It's not about going from privilege to not privilege or going from the God realm to the street realm.

It's about taking whatever you're attached to and dealing with that.

He says this in the book in several different times.

One is a reference to Patil Rinpoche,

The great 19th century teacher.

He gives several examples to show us that attachment has its own particular obstacles and it has nothing to do with what's on the other end of it.

You can be very attached to altruism.

You can be attached to criminality.

You can be attached to addiction.

You can be attached to generosity.

It has to do with the quality of attachment itself.

That's where the mind gets stuck.

It has to do with a fixed mind repeating itself again and again and again,

Which leaves us not free in the moment to explore whatever arises.

We cannot accept what is going on in front of us because we're bringing in this fixed mind based on some preconception,

Memory,

Karma,

History,

Whatever it is.

Unless we can let go of that,

We can't be here.

It's the attachment that is the obstacle.

It has nothing to do with the privilege.

That I think is what we can learn from him.

And I think he's very clear about this because he knows.

He doesn't want people to follow him in terms of giving up their lives and going on this kind of retreat.

But I think he would like us to take a look at what we're most attached to.

The littlest thing.

It could be something very small in our lives.

We're trying to think of like the smallest possible little attachment.

You know,

It has to do with things like getting annoyed when the bus pulls out.

But sugar,

Well,

Sugar is a big attachment.

You know that.

That's not an easy thing to give up.

But there you go.

I mean,

Could it be easier to give up sugar than to go and live on the street?

I think sugar is harder.

Okay.

For you,

Maybe it is.

That's the whole point.

Actually,

That is the point.

For you,

It probably is.

If I could live on the street and eat sugar,

I'd be happy.

Okay,

Helen.

Let's get back to the book.

In the process of writing it,

How much of a role did you have in shaping the narrative?

In other words,

What did you have in mind?

I didn't come to the project with anything in mind.

But there definitely were ways in which I think about things that did get into the book in terms of the questions that I asked.

For example,

I think that I typify a certain kind of post Freudian American person with a fair amount of psychological understanding and is part of my own DNA.

So I asked questions about how you felt,

To Minshu Rinpoche,

How you felt I would push for those answers in a way that somebody working with him from a different culture,

Especially Asia,

May not have asked the same questions.

I think you can see that when reading the book,

It helped shape the book,

The tone of the book.

And so you did in fact ask questions about his interior life.

That a Tibetan might not have been as inclined to ask his teacher.

Yeah,

I think a Tibetan would not have been inclined to ask his teacher and teachers left on their own don't talk about it that much.

But if you ask,

When I asked Minshu Rinpoche,

He was very forthcoming,

But left on his own if he's simply describing something,

He might not have gone to that place of feeling,

Especially those feelings of being overwhelmed and feeling scared or his panic attacks.

He may not have gone there on his own.

So he did need some investigation,

Like how were you feeling?

Can you talk more about that?

Those were very much the questions that a Westerner would ask.

And when you attempt to clarify something when you were working with him,

Were you ever worried about distorting what he was saying with the teachings?

I think I brought him to death trying to read everything back to him over and over and over again,

Making sure I got it right.

Now that doesn't mean that distortions wouldn't have crept in because his English is limited.

So even though I could read it to him,

There could still be distortions.

But I was dependent on particularly two of his own students who read the manuscript very carefully.

In this case,

I was also dependent on Andrew Holicek,

Who teaches extensively about the bardos.

He has a course coming right up,

A tricycle.

I saw it on online the other day,

Tricycle course on the bardos.

So Andrew was very helpful in making corrections.

So I was very dependent on people who knew the material and Rinpoche's students who teach in his tradition to help clarify teaching points.

Did you ever find yourself in a push-pull with him or at odds or did you press him?

Yes,

Yes,

I did.

I did.

Because Minju Rinpoche left on his own.

All he wants to do is teach.

So he would,

Like in the middle of dying,

He would say,

Oh,

This is a really great time to have a teaching about some mandala practice or something.

You know,

Now sit with your back straight.

And I say,

Rinpoche,

We want to know what happened.

We want to know whether he died or not.

We want to know what's going on here.

So there was a kind of no,

No,

No,

We can't have a teaching.

You want to know whether he died or not?

We want to get on with the story.

That was the point.

His first book,

Joy of Living,

Has a lot of stories,

Teachings and stories.

And that's a wonderful book.

But my point in this book was that nothing can compete with your story.

The story here is so dramatic.

His story of what happens when he sneaks out of his own monastery to live on the streets,

It's such a dramatic story.

And of course,

He wants the teachings.

That's why he wants to write the book.

He doesn't want to just write the book so he can write a novel about it or have a memoir.

He wants the tea trees.

So there was a push-pull about that.

You know,

The descriptions in the book are very vivid.

And since you wrote them,

He must have described them at least in some detail.

But had you visited most of these places that you were describing?

Yeah,

I have.

That must have made it much easier.

Yeah,

I've been in India a lot for the last 10,

15 years.

So I'm very familiar with Churga Monastery in Bodh Gaya.

I'm familiar with the Gaya train station,

Which is a nightmare.

I'm familiar with the Varanasi train station.

I have gone on the lowest class rail,

But not since the 1960s.

In my more recent trips to India,

I'm in the AC class.

And then,

And I certainly know Benares,

Where the cats are,

Varanasi.

And I have been to Kushnagar,

Which takes place at the end of the book,

Where he is at the end of the book.

But I haven't been there for a long time.

But yeah,

I know those places.

You know,

One of the most dramatic aspects of the book is his departure,

His initial departure.

And we haven't talked about that.

But he stole out in the dead of night.

And it was discovered that he left a letter.

And this caused a lot of grief to his students,

To his family,

And so forth.

Do you want to say something about that?

Well,

I can remember when I heard about the letter,

He had told us a year before that he was going to go into an extended retreat for at least three years.

And that was shocking.

He was going to disappear.

But then the following year,

He had spent making elaborate preparations for being away.

The one thing we didn't know is where he was going to do his retreat.

But we assumed that it was going to be in one of his own monasteries,

Or in some hermitage.

There are hermitages in some of the monasteries in Nepal and India,

Where,

You know,

People do take care of you,

People bring you your food,

You're not totally isolated.

It never occurred to us that he would actually choose to live as a wandering sadhu.

And it was completely shocking.

I don't remember exactly where I was at.

I must have been in the United States.

But it was really,

Really surprising.

And he was such a hothouse orchid growing up,

You know,

That the idea of him living on the streets was difficult to imagine.

You know,

The action in the book,

How far into the retreat was he?

About three weeks.

About three weeks.

The action takes place within the first three weeks of his wandering retreat.

And yet he was gone for four years or almost four years.

Did he talk at all about what happened after that near death experience?

Or you know,

One would hope that's a forthcoming book?

Well,

Eric Swanson,

Who worked on the first two books with him is in the process of working on another book,

Which is supposed to be covering those four years.

So hopefully we'll find out more about it.

Yeah,

Every now and then we'd receive pictures or I remember we were on a trip to Bhutan and one of his students read a letter that he had sent to his mother that she had passed along to the students.

So it's very moving.

But I think that was two,

Two,

Three years in,

I don't remember.

But in any event,

So he's back.

He's resumed his life as a high Lama with all of the comforts that go with that.

And apparently he has a very busy teaching schedule and the Sangha is growing.

Did you notice any transformation when he returned?

Was there any difference?

He says about his own change,

That he became much more carefree,

Not careless,

But carefree.

And I can see some of that with him.

He seems much more relaxed in many different ways.

The way he stands,

The way he sits,

The way he walks,

His whole demeanor seems more relaxed.

He used to and still does in many ways as a very crisp quality to his presence.

He still has that.

But there is a sense of just being more relaxed,

Being able to accommodate even more than he did in the past.

You're listening to Tricycle's editor and publisher,

James Shaheen,

In conversation with Helen Torkoff,

Tricycle's founding editor and the co-author of In Love with the World,

A Monk's Journey Through the Bardo's of Living and Dying with Minjor Rinpoche.

Interested in hearing additional Buddhist teachings?

Join Tricycle's online classroom for our new course,

Living and Dying,

Navigating the Bardo's,

With expert guide,

Andrew Holochek.

In this six-part course,

You will learn about the Tibetan Buddhist approach to facing the future without anxiety,

Accepting endings with greater ease,

And relating to death as an opportunity.

This course starts July 1st,

And Tricycle podcast listeners receive a $25 discount when they enroll with the code TRIPOD25.

Enroll now at learn.

Tricycle.

Org.

And now,

Let's return to James Shaheen's conversation with Tricycle's founding editor,

Helen Torkoff.

So,

If you don't mind,

I'd like to talk a little bit about your role as founding editor of Tricycle.

One of the things Tricycle did early on,

In fact,

Was expose improprieties in a number of sanghas,

And there was quite a bit of blowback.

In this way,

You were a target because you were editing a magazine that wrote about things people didn't want to hear about,

Particularly sexual impropriety.

First of all,

Like,

How was that?

How was doing that?

And what was it like withstanding the kind of blowback that you got?

And how are things different now?

You know,

We did publish at least a couple of articles and references to impropriety in the Buddhist communities.

The one that got the most attention was an interview that I did with June Campbell,

Who was based on her book called,

I believe it was called Traveler in Space.

And in this book,

June Campbell,

Who I think at that time,

She was already had become a scholar of certain aspects of Buddhism.

And this book basically,

Is a history of Tantra,

And shows the transition from Tantra,

How it developed in India,

And the kinds of changes it went through when it went up into Tibet.

Wasn't it also a critique of the Tulku system?

I think it might have been.

I think it might have been.

It's been so long.

Basically,

She talks about the equality between the sexes in India,

Which does not have a monastic tradition.

And how that changes once you get into Tibet,

Where you have a very monastic system.

And men are basically told,

Especially monks,

To stay away from women,

To shun women.

And then at some point,

As part of their practice,

Some of them may be told,

Now it's time to take a consort.

And how in that kind of framework,

There is no possibility of the kind of equality that you had when you had real gender equality in India a thousand years earlier.

And in the process of talking about this in the book,

She reveals that she had a sexual relationship with the late Kallu Rinpoche.

And this was extremely shocking news.

It was shocking when the book came out,

And then we did this interview,

Which went over this material.

And Kallu Rinpoche,

It was shocking for many reasons.

We understood him to be a celibate monk.

So it appeared that he broke many vows.

What kinds of vows he had actually ever taken in his life,

I have no idea.

But June Campbell was totally demonized for this.

She was shunned by her community.

The Tibetan teachers in America and in Asia just went nuts.

And they basically did what they do in the kinds of accusations.

They had done it before and they've done it since,

Which is to say that she was not psychologically fit,

That she was lying,

That she was unstable,

That she had problems.

They tried to discredit the whistleblower just the same way they did with the woman who came forth at the Kavanaugh hearing,

Chrissy Blasey Ford.

It was exactly the same language.

So I actually often think of June Campbell now.

In retrospect,

I think of her as the Anita Hill of Buddhism because she just got really vilified.

And then I did also because I published her.

So they said she was crazy and I knew that she was crazy and I published this anyway,

Therefore I was crazy.

And this just went on and on and on.

Yeah,

I remember that very well.

I was the associate publisher collecting faxes on a daily basis and delivering them to you.

Yeah.

But actually,

You say we publish several things.

The fact is that there were a lot of other incidences at that time that many of us in the community knew about.

But we could not publish anything because these women would not come forth.

They did not want to use their names.

This was very,

Very common.

It's something that men have a very difficult time understanding,

Exactly in the same way that we saw with the Kavanaugh hearings.

Men basically held it against this woman who came forth for waiting so long.

They said,

Well,

If this really happened,

She would have come forth earlier.

They did not understand.

And it's hard to understand.

It's subtle why women do not come forth to talk about these things.

So even though I knew about situations with teachers who were outed 20 years later,

Like a Sogla Rinpoche,

Like Lama Norla,

These stories were around in the mid 90s.

But we couldn't do anything unless women wanted to come forward.

And now we have the Me Too movement.

This is the great benefit of the Me Too movement.

You know,

I just want to say that many of the women who spoke off the record had signed nondisclosure agreements.

And I think some restitution was made and they were not able to speak on the record.

That was the case with Sogla Rinpoche.

That was the lawsuit.

That's what I'm referring to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I was still under a lot of pressure to publish that story without using the woman's name and I felt very strongly that unless somebody wanted to take responsibility for what they were saying,

That it was quite unethical to publish the material.

You know,

That's controversial in itself because the question of anonymity is a pretty hotly debated one.

But how are things different with Me Too?

What I can say is that as these scandals surface in our communities,

It's very easy for me and for our group to report on them.

People don't really say much about that.

They pretty much expect that we'll report on it now.

It's a very different environment.

It's not a risk when something happens as with the Sakyong,

Mipham Mukpo.

It's not a risk to write about that.

So how do you see things have changed or what was the tipping point?

What's different?

I think the Buddhist communities in many ways have always reflected the culture at large.

And so it's reflecting it now where the whole culture has changed.

It took a collective voice in many areas.

Why it took so long?

That's a matter of debate in terms of cultural or sociological history.

I don't really know all the answers to that.

It's certainly been coming for a long time,

But yes,

There was a tipping point.

I don't know how to describe that particular… It seems part and parcel of the Me Too movement as well.

Oh,

I mean,

That's what I'm referring to.

I'm sorry.

Yeah,

No,

That is what I'm referring to.

If you think of the Vaja region,

Tom Rich,

During the Shambhala meltdown years ago,

Reporting on that would have been very different from reporting on Shambhala's troubles now with the Sakyong.

It's a completely different social and political environment.

Well part of it is that I think we needed some time to get away from our earliest history with some of these teachers,

Not just the Tibetan teachers,

Because these scandals were going on in the Zen communities also.

We had the same issue with the Zen communities.

There was one in particular where,

Again,

It was a teacher who was just known for sexual impropriety over and over and over again,

But we couldn't get women to use their names.

Do you mean Sasaki Roshi or Dedo Roshi?

No,

I was actually thinking of Edo Roshi.

Dedo Roshi,

Right.

But I think that to some extent we had to get away from our earliest idealization of these teachers that we had in the 60s and the 70s.

We had a lot of sort of stories and narratives and fantasies about who these guys were.

Actually we didn't have a clue,

And I don't think we knew much about how Buddhism really worked.

And we were young,

We were so young.

And so I think to some extent,

I don't know what was going on with Hollywood where you have like parallel Me Too disclosures,

But I think in Buddhism you had to have a certain kind of time to sort of look at things in a somewhat more distant way.

You know,

This goes to one of the reasons that you founded the magazine to begin with.

What was the need for it at the time?

Yeah,

Well in the mid-80s there were several scandals in the Buddhist communities.

In the Zen communities,

The Tibetan community,

And the Vipassana community,

IMS community.

And so at that time there was no place to write about this.

It wasn't even about names and outing particular people.

We just weren't allowed to write about sexual scandals.

It was just under the covers,

So to speak.

I didn't mean that as a bad punch.

But we were so enthusiastic and so idealistic that to talk about problems in the communities seemed antithetical to this whole project we were engaged in of bringing Buddhism to America.

So we wanted to try to airbrush it and make it all look wonderful,

Even when it wasn't.

So even discussing it without using names was problematic in those days.

But as things heated up,

And particularly with the Vajra region scandal,

Which was a little bit later,

The need for some kind of public forum became more and more obvious.

And the mainstream media started covering some of these scandals.

And the feeling was,

Well,

If they're going to cover these scandals,

Then we should own them.

They should be part of a Buddhist context,

At least put them in a sympathetic context where we can look at the whole thing and own it as our own and say,

Yeah,

We've got these problems.

Let's deal with it.

Right.

You know,

I just want to ask you about your own path.

You started in the Tibetan tradition.

You spent 10 years at Zen Center,

New York,

At Bernie Glassman's place up in Yonkers.

And then you came back to the Tibetan tradition.

What's that been like?

In other words,

You've been around the block a few times,

Helen.

At the time,

After my primary Zen teacher died,

That was Myzumi Roshi,

Another teacher that had gotten caught in a series of scandals that involved sex and alcohol.

He died,

I think it was 97,

Not sure,

97.

You mean Myzumi Roshi?

Myzumi Roshi.

Yeah,

Right,

That was 97,

I think.

And I didn't have a particular idea of I want to go back to Tibetan Buddhism or I want to stay in the Zen tradition.

I really didn't have,

I didn't have any ideas about that.

But I was at a loss for who to study with,

For a particular person to study with.

I also at that time was working very hard at Tricycle and I didn't really have time to sort of go around and sign up for this retreat or that retreat and,

You know,

Explore different possibilities.

And I had to wait for several years until I,

You started doing more and more and I was doing less and less and then I had… I remember.

And then I had some time to move around.

And I met Minjim Rinpoche in New York City in a social context and I didn't have any feelings about him much one way or the other.

But then he was going to do a retreat at Gempo Abbey in Cape Breton and I spend a lot of time in Cape Breton.

So this sort of seemed like it was in my backyard and it would be worth going to.

And so that's the retreat that really sold me on studying with him.

Did it strike you that he's so young?

I mean,

Maybe half your age,

Not quite,

But… Yeah,

It did.

It did.

But it only strikes me as a concept when I think about it.

Like,

You know,

He's young enough to be my son or my grandson or something.

Son,

Maybe.

But when I'm with him,

It doesn't really come up.

I mean,

He's such an extraordinary,

To my mind,

To my experience,

He's such an extraordinary,

Extraordinary meditation master and his understanding is so profound that the age is not an issue at all.

Are you discussing writing another book with him?

No.

No?

Not now.

Is that not going to happen or is it something you'd look forward to?

I have no idea.

You know,

I hear a lot of people talking about the future of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

It's such a unique sort of cultural artifact and people wonder,

Can it survive here with its infrastructure,

Its hierarchical organization and so forth,

Its customs that are so unfamiliar to us in the West?

How do you see that?

I don't think there's much about Tibetan Buddhism as it was practiced in old Tibet that is going to survive in any very robust way going forward in the West or in America specifically.

My hope is that the essence of it will be able to transform into different kinds of modes and paradigms so that we can maintain these very,

Very extraordinary teachings that we have,

That we don't lose the essence of those and we figure out a whole different way of presenting them.

The biggest obstacle,

Or not the biggest,

There are many obstacles to studying Tibetan Buddhism in the West,

Everything from visualizations to deity practice to guru devotion.

There are ways,

I believe,

I personally believe that there are ways of transposing all of those ideas onto different models,

But that work hasn't really truly begun yet and I think it will take some form of dialogue between the Asian teachers and the Western teachers.

I don't think the Western teachers can really do it on their own.

The Asian teachers definitely can't do it on their own,

But I think if they work together,

They can maybe come up with new ways of talking to us,

For example,

About guru devotion.

If you read the old text,

If you read texts on gurus from a thousand years ago,

They look totally middle evil.

They just don't play at all,

But I think a lot of contemporary teachers would say to you,

Yeah,

Of course,

You can't use those literally.

You can't take those literally.

What's the matter with you?

Grow up.

But we need help translating them and we need help figuring out what they really mean and how they really,

We can apply them in some kind of a way that makes sense to us and that helps us.

All of these things are aids to our practice.

That's my understanding.

So we have to figure out how is it going to help our practice in the 21st century.

Is that a concern that your sangha shares?

Is it a discussion that you have or is it just your idea?

Yeah,

I don't know the answer to that.

Are you hopeful?

Well,

I'm hopeful in that I think Tibetan Buddhism has such extraordinarily powerful elements in it that I don't think they're going anywhere soon.

In that sense,

I'm hopeful that they are long lasting.

They've lasted a long time and they're extraordinary powerful aids for us.

In that sense,

I'm hopeful.

But I do think that we need help in making translations.

Okay,

So one last question.

Tell me Helen,

Do you still read Tricycle?

Of course.

I'm so happy to hear that.

In fact,

I thought the last issue was particularly terrific.

I know it had Minda Rinpoche's article.

But other than that,

I thought the article about,

I think her name was Conover,

About losing her family in that accident was terrific.

There was an article by Daisy Hernandez.

Is that her name?

Daisy Hernandez.

I thought that was terrific.

I got a lot of good feedback.

The spread on the Japanese artwork,

I thought was wonderful.

So I thought it was great.

Thank you.

That's very good to hear.

We're glad we have your seal of approval.

Okay,

Helen Torkov,

Thank you so much for joining us.

You've been listening to Helen Torkov discuss her new book,

In Love with the World,

A Monk's Journey Through the Bartos of Living and Dying,

Here on Tricycle Talks.

For more episodes,

Visit us at tricycle.

Org slash podcast.

Tricycle Talks is produced by Paul Ruest at Argo Studios in New York City.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle,

The Buddhist Review.

Thank you for listening.

Reviews

Excellent and interesting talk. I just stumbled on this and know very little about Buddhism.

I struggle with thr heartbreaking disappointments on a daily basis. I've been in an environment where catastrophising was around me on a daily basis. So I jump when I see my own shadow at times.
Even distancing myself from my toxic and negative parents, it is so familiar that it draws me there.
It's almost like a mourning process of my parents, even though they are still alive and very much sitting in that reality.
So I can't process where I'm meant regain the new way of living. I can see and feel it but the old rotten ways are still very alive and pushy, both in reality and in my memories.
Retraining mu brain is not easy.
My dad even sat there just the other day when I had to visit them, had to being the appropriate word, and talked about someone else, how they should reflect on themselves, really look and see themselves.
The mental abuse I was subjected to was a slow trickle, he did it like a professional.
I nearly died inside.
I journal most days and that helps massively. But seeing past them. Looking past that familiar yet toxic culture, is fear.
I so want to put my big girl pants on and not just face it but develop it into positive things.
I've been institutionalised within my own family. That's a hard one to face, like it was my awfully painful secret.
I want to reach out and cry that they did wrong. But they are so in their own delusions that they wouldn't accept it anyhow.
So what do I do with the residue?! Meditation yes, journal yes, acceptance, yes I can to a point. But I can't trust, not even myself. I must practice trusting in myself.
The change can only happen in me. I'm great at saying it, seeing it. But I'm still hiding behind all the mistakes and reactions that I made before, after experiencing this abuse , that wasn't fault, and regrets that I didn't keep running at 18 years old.
Knowledge is great until you know too much and you are not ready for it all.
My dad obsessively brain washed me to not spend money to save and to live simply. But to the extreme.
So I've spent a lot of my life living with nothing, seeing how good I can be at not spending too much and although it has taught me how to be disciplined, it has trapped me too in fear of what might happen. Won't I be able to stop when I buy a few nice things, that trusting of myself issue again.
So this talk, of the Buddhist monk living with nothing, I relate in a very strange kind of way.
I must practice not just loving myself, but allowing myself to live in better standards.
I don't care about me. I don't think I deserve it. I must practice actually being honest with myself. All the spiritual stuff is lost on me otherwise.
Thank you so much for these insights 😍

I have read Mingur Rinpoche's book and found it has been instrumental in getting an understanding of the deathless state. Broadening my understanding of a universal state where death in this life is almost insignificant. Thank you for this discussion.

Interesting, thank you🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Very nice. Awesome book as well.