Eve Lynn Rolls Elliott

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My father, Tenzin Yongdu aka Harold Rolls was the architect for Karme Choling Shrine in Vermont. A quote from page 26 in "The Way of the Warrior" by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche: I worked with an architect when we were building an addition to Karme-Choling a practice center I founded with my students in rural Vermont. This gentleman planned the whole addition, from the shrine room to renovating the kitchen. We agreed about everything until I suggested that we needed columns in the shrine hall.... ....It turned out there was a structural need for the columns. . I hold in my hands a copy of these words. My father's student, Robin, mailed them to me to share with my brother Howard Rolls. . While milling after the 2023 memorial service for my father, my brother Howard, who assisted my father with making the drafts and plans for Karme Choling, told Robin and her friend Sharon, a couple of Tenzin's meditation students, about an incident he remembered of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche drawing two vertical lines with a horizontal line over them on piece of scrap paper; he had encountered cross cultural language difficulties. As the drawing was passed around, people wondered what he was trying to say. When my brother Howard got his turn to look at the paper, he saw the intended meaning, "He wants columns." . After my father's passing, I began meeting with my father's students on Tuesday evenings. The class my father started continues meeting on Tuesday evenings to this day, November 12, 2025. The class has been studying "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma". The first volume, "The Path of Individual Liberation", has been completed. Currently we are studying chapter 44 of the second volume, "The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion." We hope to keep meeting on Tuesday evenings to study "The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness". . Several months after my father's passing, a married couple from our small group of students, a couple who now meets with our class on zoom from Peru, named their newborn daughter Galita Tenzin, in remembrance of their teacher, Tenzin Yongdu. The wife has painted a picture of Tenzin for their home. Three other students, have a photograph of their teacher on framed canvas in their homes. I zoom with one of the students in the nearby home he cares for with his wife; I see both the canvas photo hung prominently over his computer and other photographs, along with books he studied in classes with my father. One book has hand-written notes of my father's preparations for using with his students. Two classes met in the public libraries in Canajoharie and Fort Plain, New York, USA. During COVID-19, the two classes joined to meet on zoom. They continued to do so until my father's passing in 2023, and then kept meeting beyond his passing. . Students from the Tuesday class also zoom regularly on a link for Dharma Ocean Foundation, with a larger group led by Anne Stevens for daily meditation in the morning. Some attend more regularly than others. The morning meditation begins with Sharon ringing a gong my father purchased in Katmandu while I was visiting him in October 2014, before he came to live with me in January 2015. He moved to my low altitude home, in the midst of poor people in distressed homes on Division Street in Fort Plain. After 20 years of living at Pullahari Monastery, his heart and lungs could no longer tolerate the high altitude. For exercise, my father took afternoon walks regularly in his maroon and gold robes up the hill to the cemetery, until changing to the easier path along Reid Street passed the Catholic Church. . I moved into my home on November 12, 2005, twenty years ago today, the day I married my husband. My father moved in with my husband and my husband's blind brother ten years later, in 2015, ten years ago. My father divested to live a life of humility. The people in our community and most of his students did not know, until after his passing, of the renowned architectural work my father did. His work included low income housing with a firm in New York City, housing for seniors with a partner in Vermont, monasteries for the Buddhist community with humility before his teacher.
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