KRISHNAMURTI MEETS PRABHAVANANDA

Christopher Isherwood describes a meeting between philosopher and spiritual teacher J.Krishnamurti and Vedanta's Swami Prabhavananda. It took place on October 10, 1944 at the newly-opened Vedanta Center of Southern California at Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara. The Swami had come up from his Hollywood Vedanta Center to conduct a class. The Swami and Krishnamurti had never met before. As it happened, Krishnamurti lived just down the road in Ojai. Isherwood noted that the Swami had always been prejudiced against Krishnamurti because Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society had generated much publicity on Krishnamurti's behalf many years before in India. As a youth, the Swami had been outraged when Mrs. Besant announced that Krishnamurti was an avatar. Later she used to annoy Brahmananda, Head of the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order in India, by trying to involve him with the Theosophical Movement. As a monk, the Swami had had standing orders not to admit her to the monastery when Brahmananda was there.

As it happened the 1944 meeting between Krishnamurti and Prabhavananda was a huge success. Krishnamurti sat quietly and modestly at the back of the class. And when the Swami was through, Krishnamurti came over and they greeted each other with the deepest respect, bowing again and again with folded palms. And then they had a long chat, becoming very cheerful and Indian, and laughing like schoolboys, as Isherwood put it. Isherwood went on to say, "Some of Krishnamurti's followers, who had sneaked in, knowing in advance that he was coming there--which we didn't--stood eyeing us (Vedantists) a bit suspiciously. But within fifteen minutes we had begun to fraternize. So a small but useful bridge was build."

It is interesting to return here to Alan Watt's account of his conversation over tea with the Swami some time later, when the subject of Krishnamurti came up. This was at Prabhavananda's Vedanta Center in Hollywood. It began when one of the the sisters (nuns, who were serving the tea) said, rather too innocently, "Oh, Mr. Watts, I'd be so interested to know what you think about Krishnamurti."
"Well," Watts replied, "I must say that I find his work very fascinating, because I think that he is one of the few people who have come to grips with such basic problems of the spiritual life as trying to make oneself unselfish."
"Yes, Krishnamurti is a very fine man," the Swami chipped in. "I don't think any of us can doubt the greatness of his character. But his teaching is very misleading. I mean, he seems to be saying that one can attain realization without any kind of yoga or spiritual method, and of course that isn't true."

The moral of the story is that two people can have decidedly different points of view on spiritual matters, but that is no reason why they cannot be friends, or at least acquaintances. They might even like being neighbors.

REINCARNATION IN VEDANTA

According to the Hindu sage Adi Shankaracharya, the world - as we ordinarily understand it - is like a dream, fleeting and illusory. To be trapped in samsara (the rounds of birth and death) is the result of our ignorance of the true nature of our existence. It is ignorance (avidya) of one's true self (Atman) that leads to ego-consciousness, grounding one in desire and a perpetual chain of reincarnation. The idea is intricately linked to action (karma), a concept first recorded in the Upanishads. Every action has a reaction and the force determines one's next incarnation. One is reborn through desire: a person desires to be born because he or she wants to enjoy a body, which, it so happens, can never bring deep, lasting happiness or peace (ānanda). After many births every person becomes dissatisfied and begins to seek higher forms of happiness through spiritual experience. When, after spiritual practice (sādhanā), a person realizes--by intuitive insight as opposed to merely intellectual understanding--that the true self is the immortal soul (Atman) rather than the body, or the ego, all desires for the pleasures of the world, all wanting to have this, to do that, or to be that, vanish. Worldly pleasures and ambitions seem insipid compared to spiritual ānanda. When all desire has vanished the person will not be born again. When the cycle of rebirth thus comes to an end, a person is said to have attained liberation (moksha). All schools agree that moksha implies the cessation of worldly desires and freedom from the cycle of birth and death, though the ultimate end differs among them. Followers of the Advaita Vedanta school believe that they will spend eternity absorbed in the perfect peace that comes with the realization that all existence is One Brahman with which the soul is identical. Dvaita schools, which do not believe that Brahman and Atman are one but are two distinct entities, perform worship (bhakti) with the goal of spending eternity in a spiritual world or heaven (loka) in the blessed company of Vishnu, i.e. Brahman.

VEDANTA REVISITED

Vedanta is described as "the loftiest of Vedic knowledge." It's teachings are based on the mystical experience and the philosophical expression of the ancient sruti or "revealed" truth. Vedantists are often termed nonsectarian since they do not worship any particular deity. Many of India's scholars and distinguished persons at the forefront of public life--like the Nobel Prize poet, Rabindranath Tagore, and Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India's learned President (1962-1967) who once taught Comparative Religions at Oxford--have expressed deep reverence for Vedantist thought. As the accepted philosophy of intellectual Hinduism, Vedanta has also attracted to it in recent times a number of Western thinkers and artists.

Vedanta emphasizes Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, the "One-Without-a-Second," infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent and incomprehensible, from whom the universe eternally evolves, appears and disappears. Although conceived far back in the early Upanishadic schools of philosophy, Vedanta today is the result of a continuous process of development. At the same time, the ideas embodied in the rather general term "Vedantism" have never been combined in one fixed system. They are, as Dr. Radhakrishnan has said, "simply the thoughts of the wise, not always agreeing in detail, and presented as independent utterances, each with its own values." An example of this deliberate absence of theological systematization can be found in a volume of general essays, Vedanta for the Western World, edited by author and novelist Christopher Isherwood, and published in the United States in 1946. Distinguished Western contributors included Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, John Van Druten, and again Christopher Isherwood, along with many eminent Hindu swamis and sannyasins, sannyasins being persons who have renounced their lives as ordinary citizens to live the holy life.

Among the many approaches to God possible in the different Vedantist schools there might be briefly mentioned two means designated as "the method of the monkey," and "the method of the cat." In the latter concept a person is "saved" by God without participation or effort on his or her part, just as a kitten is carried to safety by the scruff of the neck. In the former a person wishing salvation must turn and cling to God as a baby monkey clings to its mother.

The highest types of Vedantist training are concerned with shifting the attention from the exterior to the interior world. In a sense it might be claimed that Vedanta offers its followers a map and guidebook to the unknown inner world from which alone, in its view, the mysteries of the so-called objective world may be understood and put in proper perspective.

Dr. Radhakrishnan has written: "From the outward physical fact, attention shifts to the inner immortal self (Atman) situated at the back of the mind, as it were. We need not look to the sky for the bright light; the glorious fire is within the soul (Atman)."

Specific exercises are considered essential to bring about this direct apprehension of Atman/Brahman in its pure form. Training comprises the study of certain religious texts, sessions with an approved teacher (guru), listening to this person and also, significantly, exchanging discussion with him in an analytical manner. These first stages are to be followed by ever more profound reflection and a deepening of meditation until the aspirant has arrived at a certain one-pointed inner concentration "beyond the sphere of argument or reasoned thought."

The daily meditation which forms so essential a part of a Vedantist's discipline finds ultimate realization in the phrase: Tat vam asi, "That art Thou." In other words, a person's hidden self or soul (Atman) is identical with Brahman, the World Soul, so called. Regarding Brahman, a modern Vedantist, Swami Nikhilananda, who lived and taught in the West, adds: "Brahman does not exist as an empirical object--for instance, like a pot or a tree--but as Absolute Existence, without which material objects would not be perceived to exist. Just as a mirage cannot be seen without the desert, which is its unrelated substratum, so also the universe cannot exist without Brahman." And Atman is Brahman.

MATTHIEU RICARD, CONTEMPORARY TIBETAN BUDDHIST

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, an author, translator, and photographer. He has lived, studied, and worked in the Himalayan region for over forty years.

The son of French philosopher Jean-François Revel and artist Yahne Le Toumelin, Matthieu was born in France in 1946 and grew up among the personalities and ideas of Paris’ intellectual and artistic circles. He earned a Ph.D. degree in cell genetics at the renowned Institut Pasteur under the Nobel Laureate Francois Jacob. In 1967, he traveled to India to meet great spiritual masters from Tibet.

After completing his doctoral thesis in 1972, he decided to concentrate on Buddhist studies and practice. Since then, he has lived in India, Bhutan, and Nepal and studied with some of the greatest teachers of that tradition, Kyapje Kangyur Rinpoche (1897-1975) and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910-1991).

He is the author of several books including The Monk and the Philosopher, a dialogue with his father; The Quantum and the Lotus, a dialogue with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan; Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill; and The Art of Meditation. His books have been translated into over twenty languages.

Living in close proximity to Tibetan teachers and culture has enabled him to capture on camera the spiritual masters, landscapes, and people of the Himalayas. He is the author and photographer of Journey to Enlightenment, Buddhist Himalayas, Monk Dancers of Tibet, Tibet: An Inner Journey, Motionless Journey, and Bhutan: Land of Serenity. His work has been exhibited in New York (RMA Museum, Aperture Gallery), Paris, Perpignan (Visa pour l’image), Winthertur, Stockholm, and Hong Kong.

Henri-Cartier Bresson said of his photographs: "Matthieu's camera and his spiritual life are one, and from this spring these images, fleeting yet eternal."

Since 1989, Matthieu has served as the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama. He is a board member of the Mind and Life Institute, an organization dedicated to collaborative research between scientists and Buddhist scholars and meditators. He is engaged in the research on the effect of mind training and meditation on the brain at various universities in the USA (Madison, Princeton, and Berkeley), Europe (Zurich) and Hong Kong.

Matthieu donates all proceeds from his books and much of his time to forty humanitarian projects (clinics, schools, orphanages, elder care, bridges, vocational training) in Himalayan areas (www.karuna-shechen.org) and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage (www.shechen.org).

When he is not traveling, Matthieu resides at Shechen Monastery in Nepal.

PEMA CHODRON, CONTEMPORARY TIBETAN BUDDHIST

Among the many contemporary Tibetan Buddhists of note, there is Pema Chodron. Ane Pema Chodron ("Ane" is a Tibetan honorific for a nun) was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City. She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California. Pema has two children and three grandchildren.

While in her mid-thirties, and following a second divorce, Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years. She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London. His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to England at that time, and Ane Pema received her ordination from him.

Pema first met her root guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (the Vidyadhara)in 1972. (The term Vidyadhara means literally "awareness holder," that is, one who constantly abides in the state of awareness). Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987. At the request of the Karmapa, she received the full bikshuni (female monastic) ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.

Pema served as the director of Karma Dzong in Boulder, Colorado until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey. The Vidyadhara gave her explicit instructions on running Gampo Abbey.

She first met the prominent Buddhist nun Ayya Khema (1923-1997) at the first Buddhist nuns conference in Bodhgaya, India in 1987, and they were close friends from that time until Ayya's death.

The success of Pema's first two books, The Wisdom of No Escape (1991) and Start Where You Are (1994), made her something of a celebrity as a woman Buddhist teacher and as a specialist in the Mahayana lojong (mind training) teachings. She and Judy Lief, also a teacher and author of Buddhism, were instructed personally by the Vidyadhara on lojong, "which is why I took off with it," she explains.

At Gampo Abbey each winter she taught the traditional Yarne (Tibetan rainy season) retreat for monastics. She spent the summers in Berkeley teaching on the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. It was in California that Pema was appointed by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche as "acharya" (senior teacher).

In 1996 she published When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, and in 2002, The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.

She is a member of the The Committee of Western Bhikshunis which was formed in the autumn of 2005.

In late 2005, Pema Chödrön published No Time to Lose, a commentary on Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. Her most recent publication is Practicing Peace in Times of War (2006). She is currently studying with Lama Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, and spends seven months of each year in solitary retreat under his direction in Crestone, Colorado.

Pema has struggled with health issues recently but her condition has improved with the help of a homeopath and careful attention to diet, and she anticipates being well enough to continue teaching programs at Gampo Abbey and in California. She plans for a simplified travel schedule with a predictable itinerary, as well as the opportunity to spend an increased amount of time in solitary retreat under the continuing guidance of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.