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Adventures on the Path To Enlightenment
An Interview with Venerable Rene. -by Catherine Slocock
Although I live and work at Vajrapani Institute, it’s not so often I get to cross paths with Vajrapani Institute’s resident spiritual teacher. His is a busy schedule. When he is not teaching, attending teachings, or in retreat, he is often hidden away in his forest meditator’s cabin, giving guidance to his students, preparing his next class or retreat, or doing whatever it is yogis do when they’re ‘home alone’.
On the rare occasions when I do have the pleasure of an encounter with Ven Rene, a scene from Lewis Carrol’s classic children’s book “Alice in Wonderland” often flashes through my mind. If there didn’t happen to be such an affectionate and respectful glow in my heart as I write, I would perhaps have reason to be concerned about the karma of mentioning this. But confident as I am of my good intention, I am prepared to admit that the fantastical creature I’m referring to is none other than a magical talking caterpillar! I will explain.
Turn to chapter five of this magical book and you’ll find a somewhat flustered Alice in conversation with a hookah-smoking caterpillar. The caterpillar is sitting on a large mushroom. The minute Alice encounters this unusual being, she finds herself on the receiving end of a deeply perplexing metaphysical inquiry. It all springs out of the caterpillar’s first words to Alice, the seemingly innocent question of ‘Who are you?” The ensuing exchange takes the reader and Alice on a dizzying ride through space and meaning as the little girl struggles to contain the ceaseless and surreal shiftings of her experiences in Wonderland.
For me, Lewis Carrol’s caterpillar has always functioned as a caricature of a meeting with the enigmatic spiritual guide: the teacher you tend to run into unexpectedly, and who has the habit of throwing your mind off its comfortable little perch. As I walked up the steep trail leading to Ven Rene’s simple but comfortable abode, a small cabin perched high on a densely wooded hillside overlooking Vajrapani Institute’s 70 acres, I reflected that this interview would perhaps present a rare opportunity to remove myself from my usual role as ‘student’.
“How has it come about,” I asked myself, “that someone from Switzerland, raised in the Christian tradition, has ended up living as a Tibetan Buddhist yogi and spiritual teacher? Perhaps an account of the journey that brought Ven Rene to Tibetan Buddhism and to ordination would provide some of the missing pieces of the jigsaw, furnishing some insights into why he chose to take the path he has taken. It would perhaps also reveal some of what it takes to devote oneself to the spiritual path.
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This lifetime’s episode of Rene’s story started in the Swiss Alps, in the wealthy lakeside city of Geneva. Travel has featured a great deal in his life and he confesses that one of his big unrealized dreams has always been to sail around the world. Instead of sailing the seven seas though, it is a largely a spiritual voyage that he has engaged on in this lifetime. Ven Rene says he was spiritually inclined even as a child. Although he was raised in the Christian tradition, as a teenager he and his friends were captivated by Jean Herbert’s French paperback translations of influential teachers of Eastern spirituality. Major influences included Ram Dass, Rama Krishna, Aurobindo and Krishnamurti.
It wasn’t long before Rene’s explorer instinct prompted him to pack his bags and head East, to check out for himself some of the spiritual traditions he had read about. Having completed an apprenticeship as a florist and a compulsory stint of military service, he embarked on the first of what would turn out to be many backpacking excursions. Arriving in India, Rene found himself powerfully affected by his first exposure to the profusion and chaos of this vibrant country.
“Everywhere in India there are religious gatherings and festivals. People are very spiritual and very exuberant in their devotion,” he says. “Christian religious expression happens only in the church or special places, but in Hinduism it happens in the
street. It’s much more alive and you’re more in contact with it in everyday life. .. as with old age, sickness and death, you see everything in the street,”
In his early and mid twenties, during various trips to the East, Rene paid visits to many landmark spiritual sites, soaking up the different traditions he was exposed to. “I had a very powerful experience in the Sikh temple in Amrisa, just by entering the place,” he recalls. “It was the beauty of it… There was a football pitch-sized pool and marble all around and you could circumambulate the lake listening to the religious chanting.” Other key locations he visited on his travels included Pokara and Kathmandu, Pushkar, Goa,Varanesi, Hampi and Sri Lanka.
Like many of his counterparts, during his time in India, Rene really was traveling on a shoestring and experiencing the rawness of the place in a very immediate way. He even slept rough for a while, living with Saddhus. For a young European, the experience was fun and full of learning opportunities. “One day my backpack was stolen and I was actually quite happy. I still had my passport and traveler’s checks so I bought a blanket to sit on and a blanket to cover me and I was happy to have very few things… It was a discovery of another way of living.”
It was not until his second trip to the East in 1979 that Rene was to connect with Tibetan Buddhism. A friend begged him to join him in Nepal for Kopan Monastery’s November LamRim course, led by Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe, and he eventually agreed. This was Rene’s first encounter with the LamRim, the Graded Path to Enlightenment, and he liked what he saw. “What I had heard before about spirituality was mostly about devotion and renunciation, but the LamRim was my first contact with a spiritual path that was very structured.” Another aspect of the LamRim course at Kopan that left a lasting impression was the meditation sessions. “We would sit every day for maybe two hours in silence and try to watch the breath. Just to see how hard it is and everything that’s happening in the mind, you discover you inner world and see how hard it is to focus on anything, and to see everything that comes up…. it was a shock!”
Although he had had a very positive first experience at Kopan, Rene continued to check out other spiritual avenues after the November retreat. ”I wanted to meet a Hindu teacher in order to be able to compare,” he says. With this goal in mind he visited Aurobindo’s ashram in south India, but the renowned teacher had already passed away. Next Rene found himself visiting
Tiruvannamalai, the place where the famous yogi Ramana Maharshi, had lived. Yet again there was no living master to be found, as the famous exponent of the “Who Am I?” self-inquiry teachings had also passed. From there Rene went on to visit Vrindavan, the birth place of Krishna, but once again the teacher had died. There followed a visit to Rishi Kesh, the Himalayan sacred source of the River Ganga, where Rene spent time living in ashrams and spending time with chillum smoking Shiva devotees.
After this Rene took some time out from his Dharma focus. Inspired by the dazzling virtuoso talent of some of the famous sitar players he had listened to, he rented a room in Lower Dharamsala and set himself the task of mastering the sitar. As with meditation, Rene started off thinking this new skill would be easy to pick up, but soon discovered otherwise. He didn’t give up easily though, practicing until his fingers bled. Fortunately for Rene’s students of the future, eventually a voice started to make itself heard in the aspiring young sitar player’s mind, pulling his attention back to his Dharma quest. “I remembered Lama Zopa Rinpoche saying to us, ‘If you put as much effort in your spiritual practice as you put in your worldly undertakings, you would have reached liberation a long time ago.’ ”
With these words ringing in his ears, Rene set off for Lawudo, the region where Rinpoche famously spent many years meditating in a cave in his last incarnation. Rinpoche was leading Nyung Nae purification practices for the Sakadawa period and Rene joined the group for 3 Nyung Naes. In terms of suffering, this new enterprise wasn’t much improvement on the hardships Rene had just left behind! The cold, the altitude and the basic living conditions took their toll. Bed bugs and fleas ravaged the group while the food played havoc with their digestive systems. To make matters worse, the Nyung Naes were chanted in Tibetan.
Despite the tough conditions and having little understanding of what was going on, Rene was hooked. “It was very exotic. And you could feel there was something a little bit magical … something deeply spiritual. And Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave the initiation of Milarepa, and this touched me very much.” Rene recalls feeling deep respect and admiration for Rinpoche as well as a sense of strong connection, but he also admits he was a little bit scared, not knowing how to relate to him. On the strength of his Lawudo experience, Rene went on to do the next annual November course in Kopan. “And then I started practicing seriously,” he says. He was only 21.
Practicing seriously took the form of first doing 100,000 Dorje Khadro fire offerings in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. Next Rene completed the Vajrasattva preliminary retreat in Dharamsala, before heading back to Europe where he spent some time at the FPMT Vajrayogini Institute in France and Lama Tsongkhapa Institute in Italy. Between this time and becoming a monk there were a couple of retreats that stand out in Rene’s memory. One was a four month Vajrayogini retreat he and a friend completed while living in tents in France, and the other was a four month tummo (inner fire) retreat in the Swiss Alps.
When Rene was 26 he had a motorbike accident and this brush with death prompted him to focus with fresh intensity on spiritual practice. He headed to Bodghaya to complete a prostrations retreat, before returning to Kopan Monastery. After completing a Samayavajra mantra retreat, (a practice purifying the relationship with one’s spiritual teachers) Rene requested an interview with the course leader, Lama Zopa Rinpoche. He asked Rinpoche whether he had the karma to someday become a monk, thinking that perhaps it might be something he would like to do later in life. Rinpoche’s response was to change Rene’s envisaged timeline on this plan dramatically. “He made the Mo (divination), like he does, and said, ‘well, it’s better now, because later there might be some obstacles, you might be involved with some women, something like that,” Rene recalls with a laugh.
Rene got ordained immediately after his interview with Rinpoche and then headed back to Europe to face the challenge of acclimatizing his family to his new role in life as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Tellingly, and somewhat paradoxically, given the original intention behind the discipline of wearing the robes of ordination, it wasn’t the fact of being a monk that Rene found hard in the early days of this career as a monk, it was the lack of anonymity that his monk’s outfit conferred on him. “I always like to be a little bit anonymous, to have nobody pay attention. I don’t like to stick out, and there, you really stick out!” he says.
More than twenty years have now passed since the day when Rene took robes, but as those that know him will confirm, not liking to ‘stick out’ is still a trait that is very evident in Vajrapani’s resident teacher today. Listening to Rene talk about his extraordinary and colorful adventures through “Wonderland”, the epic journey that led him to ordination and beyond, it strikes me that there is a beautiful irony here. His story and the choices he has made certainly make him ‘stick out’ from the crowd, revealing as they do a rare degree of courage and integrity and an uncompromising devotion to serving the Dharma and sentient beings.
In the hearts of his students and those fortunate enough to spend time with him, it seems to me Venerable Rene will always be nothing less than remarkable. Fortunately I can write these words without too much concern that this closing eulogy will cause him too much embarrassment. He will probably never even read this article and even if he does, it’s unlikely to bother him.
This is a being who has undoubtedly asked himself the question ‘Who Are You?’ enough times to know that there’s nothing to be found when you look hard enough anyway. So who is there to be embarrassed? |