It was Bill's second dathun. At the end of his first -- the first dathun altogether, in 197_ -- he had thought himself a hero, more than a hero, and was filled with dismay when Rinpoche said: "The real practice starts when you leave."
In the third week of his second one, he suddenly panicked. "What am I doing here?" he asked himself. "These people are full of shit. I've got to get away." He ducked out, ran to his car and, too impatient to go by the road, drove it right across the hayfields in his haste -- where, after the rains, it got stuck in a muddy ditch. He gunned it. The wheels spun. "I was stuck," he said.
He climbed out to survey the damage, glanced up at the shrine room -- and saw that everybody in the dathun was staring out the windows. The leader extended his arm, crooked his finger and beckoned him.
"That was my great escape," he said. "I'm really grateful to that ditch. If it weren't for that, I would have headed for New Haven or New York or someplace. Who knows what would have happened?"
* * *
A bit later, in the Vidyadhara's room, Bill asked about a picture of what looked like a Japanese girl. Rinpoche looked at him, he recalled, and said: "That's not a girl. It's Kobo-Daishi" -- Kukai, the early-ninth century monk and scholar who founded the Shingon school of Buddhism, which is Japanese Vajrayana.
"But he didn't get all the transmissions," Rinpoche continued.
"How do you know?" Bill asked -- a question he said that wouldn't have occurred to him later on, when he knew the Vidyadhara and his ways better.
Rinpoche said: "He didn't know how to perpetuate Buddhism into the future. Shingon is great. It's the full traditions of tantras. But they didn't know how to project the lineage over into the future."
"You've figured that out?" Bill asked.
"Oh, yes," the Vidyadhara said. We know how to do these things in our lineage. It won't be what you think. It may not be what you like. But we know how to do it in the Kagyu lineage."
Later, Bill said, after everything happened, including the chaos of the Vajra Regent, he thought back on that conversation -- one that seems too wholly accurate: the continuance of the lineage in our community, but not, perhaps, as we'd expected.
* * *
As a young and raw attendant -- a precursor to the kusung, the Vajra Guards who care for the Vidyadhara's clothes and personal needs -- Bill remembers being hopelessly inept. When he cooked Rinpoche rice, for instance, he scorched it. "Looks like it's burned," the Vidyadhara said as he served it, in a kindly enough voice.
Another time, on a winter's evening, Rinpoche asked for a bowl of fruit. Bill scrambled among the cans on Karme-Choling kitchen shelves, pulling one down after another until he came up with a dusty tin of plums.
Brandishing it, he burst into Rinpoche's bedroom. "Is this all right?" he demanded, waving it about.
Rinpoche looked up and said, sweetly: "Must you be so dumb and aggressive?"
Bill stood silently for a moment, flattened.
"The plums are fine," the Vidyadhara said, while Bill slunk out of the room to find a can opener and a bowl.
* * *
In the earliest years, Rinpoche's students had only the vaguest idea of who he was and how to treat him, Bill said. Once, when Rinpoche was fresh from Samye-Ling, the Buddhist meditation center he had founded in Scotland in the mid-60's, he and the three directors of Karme-Choling disagreed about a course of action.
"I think you'd better do as we say," a director told him. "After all, we can always get another lama."
Bill remembers the room growing close and the atmosphere threatening. "It was my first experience with Rinpoche throwing black air," he said -- referring to the wrathful quality a powerful lama can exude. "Rinpoche threw something at the person."
Afterwards, Rinpoche said: "The battle of spiritual materialism was first fought at Karme-Choling. The Kagyu lineage won -- barely."
"It wasn't a forgone conclusion," Bill said. "Nowadays, we tend to think that of course things would have turned out. But they might not have. The basic miracle was that Rinpoche was able to turn people like you and me into dharma students."
* * *
Some time later, when Bill was preparing to leave Karme-Choling, he asked the Vidyadhara what he should have learned from his years as director.
"For one thing," Rinpoche replied, "you might learn how you've been mistreating me all these years."
This threw Bill and caused him to think. He repeated the conversation to the other Karme-Choling administrators and board members. They all pondered. Then they came up with what they thought would be a suitably luxurious offering to expiate their apparent years of neglect and improper treatment of their guru.
Curiously, the Vidyadhara's reaction to the board's munificence of the board have gone unrecorded.
* * *
Once, Rinpoche and Eido Roshi were sitting together. Rinpoche asked, in his characteristically high and precise voice, "Roshi, what's your favorite color?"
Roshi thought for a moment, Bill recalls, and said, in a low, growly voice: "My favorite color? "Black, I think. What's your favorite color, Rinpoche?"
"Red!" Ripoche said, emphatically.
Later, thinking back on that exchange, Bill said he thought about how appropriate each man's choice was, both for themselves and the Mahayana and the Vajrayana, their respective Buddhist traditions.
Black, he realized, is the color of emptiness, of shunyata. And red -- along with other vivid hues, is the color of the luminous display of the Vajra world."
* * *
On building Karme-Choling:
The remodeling and expansion of Karme-Choling was done in anticipation of His Holiness the 16th Karmapa's visit in 1976.
It is still true that only the main shrine room and the front, the original, section of the old farmhouse is visible from the driveway. If you've ever wondered why the other wings are more or less hidden from immediate view, it's because the early administrators were "shy" about it, said Bill. They worried that the residents of tiny Barnet would object to a project of that magnitude.
And indeed, they did -- almost -- have trouble with the fire marshal. The first one they dealt with was a relaxed kind of fellow, and approved the expansion plans without putting anything in writing. After his death of a heart attack, Bill visited the new marshal, who was much more punctilious about paperwork. When he heard what was happening, he said: "You can't build a building like this in Vermont."
These weren't just plans, he told the marshal. The building was half completed. "The future of Karme-Choling hung in balance," he said.
The marshal was silent for a bit. Finally he said: "Well, I guess we'll just have to grandfather it in."
At that, Bill said, his heart started beating again.
* * *
The mortgage for the expansion of Karme-Choling in the mid-70's was huge, the biggest Vajradhatu had undertaken at that point, said Bill. But the Vermont assessors couldn't see the use of the place -- or at least couldn't imagine it would have any resale value. Their assessment was for the value of the property minus demolition costs. As for the building itself? Maybe, one of the assessors opined, the shrine room might be worth something by turning it into a stable and using it to house cows.
The motive for the renovation was the visit of His Holiness the Karmapa in 1976. "It was a huge labor of love," said Bill. For months, 52 carpenters worked two 12-hour shifts everyday to meet the visit deadline -- on a salary of $10 a week.
At the Gampopa seminar in 1971, Rinpoche called Tibetan Buddhism a bhakti, or devotional religion. "Pure devotion built this place," Bill said.
* * *
The Vidyadhara wanted the shrine room to be a huge clear expanse without pillars or any obstacles to the open space. Harold Rolls, the architect, argued with him. It can't be done, he told Rinpoche. There have to be pillars to hold the roof up. But after weeks of working on the problem, he finally came up with a design that would keep the space open and the roof securely up.
He met with Rinpoche, who said: "I think the shrine room should have four pillars."
"Rinpoche, is this a joke?" Harold said.
"No," Rinpoche said, and pointing to the architectural drawings, said, "They should go here, and here, and here, and here.'
"You mean decorative pillars?" Harold asked hopefully.
"No," Rinpoche said. "Pillars to hold the roof up."
Eventually, Bill said, Harold stopped reeling, calmed down and got to work on the pillars.
* * *
The distinctive little lights in the shrine room were designed by the Vidyadhara. His idea, said Bill, was to make them look like butter lamps in the ceiling.
* * *
Karl Springer, an early board member, had the twin abilities of rousing both people's energy and motivation to work hard and of irritating them immensely in the process. As the son of a haberdasher, he also dressed in impeccably tailored suits.
During the renovation, he employed both of these talents to their fullest, Bill recalled. At one point, he leaned against one of the pillars, which was covered with wet orange paint. Nobody said anything, said Bill. "They just watched as he was walking through the shrine room yelling at everybody, with an orange stripe down his brand-new pinstriped suit."
* * *
As it happened, much of the earth below the planned expansion was solid rock that required the use of dynamite and a 2-1/2 ton steel net. The blasting could be heard a mile away -- and was shattered to the residents at Karme-Choling, especially the participants of a dathun. There was a new blast every 45 minutes -- which meant that every half-hour, the participants would begin hunching their shoulders in anticipation. They'd wait, the minutes ticking by -- and then, KKKKEEEEECCCHHH!
They exhaled, regrouped and relaxed -- until the time came for the next explosion. KKKEEECCCHHH!!!
* * *
When the bulldozer hit the huge granite boulder on the edge of the living room, the foreman went to Bill to ask what he wanted done. Should they leave it in or blast it out.
"I went back and forth," said Bill. "In. Out. In. Out." Finally, when the decision couldn't be put off any longer, he said: "In."
The living room was built around the rock, in a much-talked about design that was much lauded in local architectural circles and that won awards. "My fault," said Bill. "If you don't like it, you've got me to blame."
* * *
Karme-Choling needed its own well for its growing community and hundreds of program participants. They hired local drillers, who drilled one hole after another without success.
When Bill mentioned this to the Vidyadhara, who was in Boulder then, he was told: "Why didn't you ask me?"
The next time Rinpoche was at Karme-Choling, he went out and walked the land, peering at it closely. He finally pointed to one spot, saying: "Drill here."
It was four feet from a dry hole. "But, Sir," Bill said. "We drilled 400 feet down here and got nothing."
Rinpoche repeated his instructions. The drillers were brought back and began work. They reached 400 feet without finding water. When Bill reported this to Rinpoche, he was instructed to keep on going, to drill deeper. After only 30 more feet, the men reached a well so rich that it became the highest-producing well in that whole area of Vermont.
Despite its numerous disadvantages, I rather love my one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, near Columbia. Yes, it's a four-story walk-up, with stairwells so narrow that my new sofa had to be taken apart before it could be carried up them. The landlord, like the vast majority of landlords here, is a rapacious slug who gets irritated when I call about the constantly broken washer and dryer. (Use them at your own risk, he grumps.) And the rent is a hefty $1,950 a month.