Confessions of an Activist Nun

Confessions of an Activist Nun

Venerable Tenzin Chogkyi, our resident teacher, shares stories and insights from a Dharma journey that brought her back to Vajrapani Institute for the third time in late 2015.

I want to offer the whole package … I don’t want to ignore the ultimate goals of Buddhism, which really are Liberation and Enlightenment, but I want to offer the whole range – offer what people are ready for.

Imagine the scene: the dust and fear and desolation of a high security prison yard in the depths of the California desert. An angry inmate holds a shard of something very sharp against the throat of a former gang leader, and he isn’t messing around. Astonishingly, the former gang member, his life possibly on the line, feels no hatred towards his assailant and makes no attempt to hurt him back. Instead, he feels his heart flood his body with a force of compassion he has never known before. Meet ‘Lloyd Dharmaseed’, one of Venerable Tenzin Chogkyi’s long-term students. Thirty years into his sentence, this is someone who has taken Buddhist Mind Training, Lojong, as a ‘heart practice.’ It is changing his world.

Lloyd Dharmaseed’s many letters from prison to Venerable Tenzin will one day make incredibly inspiring reading, when she gets around to compiling them and editing them into a book. In the meantime, Vajrapani Institute’s resident teacher has quite a busy line-up of retreats to attend to, alongside her ongoing prison work and other Dharma activities.

There has been tremendous variety and contrast in the life current that has now brought Venerable Tenzin back to Vajrapani Institute (this is her third stint here, her first being in the capacity of co-director back in early 1992). Although it wasn’t until the age of 46 that Venerable Tenzin took monastic ordination in this lifetime, she says she has a strong impression she was a monastic in a recent past life. The clues are plentiful. Even as a teenager she had a Zen Buddhist Bodhisattva Vow poster on her bedroom wall and was in the habit of reciting the Bodhisattva Vows daily before going to school. Then in the early Seventies when what she describes as ‘the Hippie Guru thing’ was in full swing, she embraced living in spiritual community with enthusiasm, residing at a number of Bay Area Ashrams. “We used to hang out with Ram Dass,back when he had the long beard and the white flowing robes!” she recalls with a grin.

Work and ‘the urban party life’ were distractions for a few years after Graduate School. But San Francisco was hit savagely by the AIDS epidemic of the Eighties and the grief of losing close friends acted as an abrupt wake-up call, pulling Venerable Tenzin back to spiritual focus and away from a successful career in hazardous waste management. She describes the horror of the AIDS epidemic experience as “like a death meditation,” catalyzing for her something of an “early mid-life crisis.” Deeply feeling the need for a spiritual teacher, and inspired by a profound sense of trust she felt on seeing TV images of His Holiness, Venerable Tenzin bought a one-way ticket to India.

It was like, “Oh my God, this is my path! It always has been, but I didn’t have a name or a context for it. This is it!”

A ten-day Lam Rim course at the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) Tushita Center in Dharamsala was the occasion of Venerable Tenzin’s full spiritual-homecoming. This was her first encounter with Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and everything made so much sense to her. “I felt like I had found a buried treasure,” she says. “All of these things I had believed and found in bits and pieces through my reading, like karma and rebirth, put into this package! My mind is very logical and organized and the very step-by-step, completely clear presentation of the Lam Rim, just resonated with me,” she remembers. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, this is my path! It always has been, but I didn’t have a name or a context for it. This is it!’”

Although Venerable Tenzin relates so strongly to the traditional Tibetan Buddhist teachings, she also recognizes that the rich and colorful life journey that preceded her first Lam Rim exposure (and her eventual ordination some years later), has served to amplify her ‘reach’ as a teacher enormously. It is extraordinary to consider that aged 17, she was actually hitch-hiking in the Yucca Valley, San Bernardino County, at the very same time that Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche were giving their first teachings in California. “If Bev, or Rich, or John Jackson or Elaine had picked me up hitch-hiking, I would have gone!” she says. If that had happened, though, she might have become a nun almost three decades earlier than she finally did. “And it’s actually good that it wasn’t how it happened,” she reflects, “Because having all of this experience, I can relate.”

Teaching in prisons is a setting where Venerable Tenzin’s gift for relating truly comes in handy. It also happens to be one of her personal passions. “Sometimes with people on the outside, there’s that thing of being ‘on the fence’. They have a really comfortable samsaric life, so they come to Dharma teachings, but they might have a bit of a dilettante thing going on. They won’t really ‘go for it’ because they don’t want to sacrifice anything. But for the guys in prison, there’s nothing to sacrifice, so they’re completely willing to go for it. I think it’s that intensity that really appeals to me. I’m kind of an intensity junkie!”

‘Intensity junkie’ rings true as a description. Venerable Tenzin reveals that she was first tear-gassed by police at the age of 14, in anti-Nixon protests during the Vietnam War. She was bitten by a rattlesnake in one of the two three-year solitary retreats she completed; she carries a tattoo on her left wrist as a spiritual reminder of a personal insight she wants to keep fresh in her heart. On paper, all of this can, and sometimes does, come across as a bit intimidating. In fact recently, on hearing the details of Venerable Tenzin’s spiritual biography, a newcomer to Vajrapani Institute was on the verge of running for the door before she had even met her! The student later laughingly recalled her initial feelings of growing dread as she heard about Venerable Tenzin’s two stretches of solitary retreat: “She was thinking, ‘Oh my God, someone’s going to just float in here and I’m not going to be able to relate to her at all!” laughs Venerable Tenzin. Luckily, the way the weekend unfolded couldn’t have been more different, or more down-to-earth, and the individual in question has already signed up for another retreat.

Having a gift for putting new Dharma students at ease, and filling a teaching hall with laughter does not mean that Venerable Tenzin shies away from sharing the more hard-core aspects of the Dharma teachings when the time feels right. In fact she is absolutely passionate about sharing the traditional principles of the path with those who are ready to respond and really ‘go for it’. But she recognizes a shift in herself as a teacher in the past ten years. Some of the zeal she felt to push people towards a wish for full enlightenment when she first emerged from long retreat has become tempered, and she is taking a longer-term view of things in her teaching philosophy.

“When I came out of retreat I was pushing and actually quite frustrated that most people weren’t there,” she admits. “But now I look at my teaching of other programs — secular programs like ‘Cultivating Emotional Balance’ that give people a way of dealing with their emotions. And I say ‘Good enough!’ It might plant a seed so they become interested in Dharma later…. I’ve become much more open-minded about that. I realize that just as some seed was planted for me in past lives, I might be the first person that opens up the possibility to someone who just comes to learn to relax, or to be calm, or to deal with their emotions. They’re not coming for Liberation or Enlightenment, but I can offer them something that helps their life now and plant some sort of a seed without saying, ‘Oh you have to be fully renounced.’

“That’s what I’m trying to do with my teachings now,” she continues. “I want to offer ‘the whole package’…I don’t want to ignore the ultimate goals of Buddhism, which really are Liberation and Enlightenment, but I want to offer the whole range – offer what people are ready for.”