Akong Rinpoché and Samye Ling: Part 8

Leading the First Group Pilgrimage

Among the many “firsts”, in the Tibetan field, is probably Akong Rinpoché’s leading the first group pilgrimage to the sacred sites of India and Nepal. In 1979, he took a group of some twenty people on an extended visit covering the four main holy sites connected with the life of the Buddha—Bodh Gaya, Lumbini, Kushinagar and Sarnath and Varanasi—as well as Nalanda, Rajgir and other nearby places associated with the Enlightened One. He took the group on to the sacred sites of Nepal, such as Bodhnath, Swayambhunath, Parping and Namo Buddha, also to Darjeeling to meet Kalu Rinpoché, to Sikkim to visit the Gyalwang Karmapa in Rumtek, to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama and to Bir to meet the Tai Situpa.

Throughout the pilgrimage, he taught not only on the places visited but also on the whole purpose of pilgrimage and how to live it to the full. This was also a very precious opportunity for the participants to meet the Karmapa, whom they had seen in Samye Ling, at his own seat and, as it turned out, soon before his passing.

Once this pilgrimage was well into the planning stage, the question arose as to who would “look after” (Rinpoché’s words) Samye Ling during the several months of his absence, one of the longest times he would have been away from Samye Ling and out of contact. Those were pre-Internet days of difficult long-distance communications that had to be set up hours in advance through the various telephone switchboards setting up a hard-wire connection between Scotland and India. Rinpoché needed to leave someone he could trust to keep an eye on all the various aspects of Samye Ling, from the most material to the spiritual, dealing with people’s emotional distress and so forth, not to mention the less stable and potentially disruptive people who might visit (we had had naked axe-wielders and the like...).

There were only two people Rinpoché could envisage for this task, namely myself and John “Jock” Miller. I was probably his own first choice, on account of having a fuller background in the meditation aspect and more ability to help with meditation questions and also because my wife Katia was going. Jock was single at the time. However, Rinpoché did not want to choose between us, as we each of us wanted to go on the pilgrimage. His solution, whatever his personal preference, was to ask Thrangu Rinpoché, who was staying at Samye Ling at the time, to do a divination (a "mo"). I will always remember him coming out of Thrangu Rinpoché’s room with a beaming smile and saying “Jock”. I asked him, “Yes, but Jock what? Jock stays or Jock goes?” He laughed and told me Jock would go on pilgrimage and that I should stay to care for Samye Ling in his absence.

The outcome of that decision was to have much more impact on the personal lives of Jock and myself than we could have ever imagined. Perhaps Rinpoché sensed somehow that it was an important decision or perhaps he simply wanted to show fairness to Jock and myself. His unwillingness to take sides between his followers or to show favour was one of his constant qualities.

 I hope to be able to add personal accounts of this pilgrimage and photos of it in the near future ... "work in progress"

......continue to the next part of the story: Establishing the Buddha-Dharma (note: this takes us to a different section in the drop-down menus, above. We go into the "benefiting the dharma" section