I live in a small town in upstate New York – 54 square miles in Delaware County, with a population of only about 1500 people.

And yet there is not one, but two thriving Tibetan Buddhist contemplative centers in my town. One of them belongs to the Kagyu lineage, the “mishap lineage,” as it’s sometimes called.

At least my teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, called it that. (Some people have even called him a mishap too. A womanizer, an alcoholic, and worse.) That’s the lineage to which I’ve belonged, on and (now) off, for the last 4 decades. I’d no idea the center was here in my little town, until I passed by it one day in my car. Hiding there in plain sight. A bit of a shock. Just like Rinpoche.

There are four major Tibetan schools or lineages. Besides the Kagyus are the Sakyas (both of them “Red hats”) and the Gelugpas (the Yellow hats). The guy who now heads the Gelugpa sect is called the Dalai Lama, and he’s the 14th reincarnation of the same “person,” dating back to the fifteenth century. My guy is called the Karmapa, and the current one is the 17th in an unbroken line going all the way back to 1100. At the age of 14, he escaped his Chinese captors, making his way across the Himalayas and arriving in India just as the new century began.

The other retreat and practice center in my town belongs to the fourth Tibetan lineage, the Nyingmas. The Old Ones, who go back furthest of all. This is where Thinley Norbu Rinpoche had his headquarters. (His father used to be the head of the Nyingmas. The Dalai Lama is the spiritual head of Tibet, but all four are considered on the same level, and all are addressed as His Holiness.)

From time to time, after I moved up here from New York, I would pay a visit to Thinley Norbu’s center, usually to celebrate a puja (a ceremonial ritual), followed by a communal meal, over which Rinpoche – pronounced RIM-poh-CHAY – an honorific used for spiritual teachers of status, meaning “Precious Jewel” – would preside as a sort of Crazy Wisdom emcee. One by one, he’d introduce his students, making them get up and give some ridiculous impromptu performance, the more excruciating and embarrassing the better, as a kind of spiritual discipline, a rite of passage, a public letting-go of ego. Let yourself be a Fool. Mercifully, as I was only a guest, I was spared having to undergo the operation, administered without benefit of anesthesia.

But I knew the deal as I’d met Thinley Norbu before, a good 20 years earlier, when I was living in the city, as though in some previous lifetime, and my life here in upstate New York was another life, a kind of karmic afterlife. He lived in a brownstone in Chelsea, owned by an American Buddhist student who had gone to Sarah Lawrence with my wife. One day, as Rinpoche had been told I worked as a documentary film editor, I was invited over and asked if I would do him a favor and edit some of his videotapes.

At first I thought he wanted me to edit some of his talks to his students. But no, these were his boxing tapes. Yes, Rinpoche was a fan of American boxing, indeed, an aficionado. He had several cartons full of these, all carefully labeled as to who had fought and when. And he wanted me to go through them and re-record small sections, a round or two, from his favorites, what today you might call a playlist. From time to time, he’d come back into the room to check my progress, as I slowly rolled and re-rolled each tape back up to its starting point, a small-time Sisyphus. It took more than a few visits to complete the task.

One time I was with Rinpoche and we had come to one of Mohammad Ali’s title fights. I turned to him and repeated the famous mantra: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. And I grinned.

Rinpoche scowled. He was furious. “All wrong!”

Then he stood up very slowly. And assumed the pose of a boxer, cocking his left fist in front of his face, his right fist held lower and closer to his body. Both feet flat on the ground, left foot forward. Like a rock. “You stand here. You look opponent in the eye. You give punch. You take punch. No butterfly. No bee.

No tricks!”

I’m still working on that one, even now, after all these years. Trying not to pull my punches. Letting myself look like a Compleat Fool. Think it’s easy? Have you tried it?

Thanks for reading The History Nobody Knows!

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