by Bob Flaws

Thus began my training with Mr. and Mrs. Kazi, a training which was to last just short of 20 years. My parents’ house had three rooms upstairs, their bedroom, my bedroom, and a den. However, by this time, my father was sleeping in my bedroom. In theory this was because of his snoring. In any case, I moved into the den. Mr. Kazi had said that one could say one bum of the refuge prayer in three days. Therefore, I sat down and did it in three days. My sole intent, or at least my sole conscious intent, was to reach enlightenment as quickly as possible. Although I had returned to New Jersey at Mr. Kazi’s instruction, I still saw myself as a dedicated yogi treading the “short path.” At this point, if the Teacher said, “Jump,” the only question was, “How high?” If the refuge could be completed in three days, then that’s what I would complete it in. I placed the tshog-shing Mr. Kazi had given me on the hutch in the den and sat in full lotus on the floor. I awoke at six A.M. and repeated the refuge as single-mindedly as possible till 10 P.M.

...

Three evenings later that there was group sadhana again, and I told Mr. Kazi afterwards that I had finished the refuge. At first he looked a little surprised. He asked me to repeat the prayer the way that I had when counting my mala or rosary. He also asked me to repeat what I had been visualizing. He must have been satisfied since he gave me permission to go on to the sem-kyed or bodhisattvic motivation. This one line prayer was approximately the same length as the refuge. I went home and also completed it in three days.

Mr. Kazi told me the next Sunday I should come to tshog at the Ehrlich’s apartment. Tshog is something akin to a Tibetan Buddhist eucharist. It is an offering ceremony whereby one can generate huge amounts of good karma in a short space of time. I was told to bring something to eat as an offering, but I was not given any other instruction. The Saturday before this ceremony I baked a sheet of brownies. It was a big sheet, so I cut off a row to eat myself at home. The next day, I arrived at the Alan and Roberta Ehrlich’s apartment. Mr. and Mrs. Kazi were already there as was their daughter, Jetsun Rinpoche. Mrs. Kazi took my sheet of brownies and put it on the altar with the other food offerings brought by the other students. During the ceremony, these offerings are believed to be purified, multiplied, and then transformed into the elixir of enlightment. Being a health-conscious vegetarian, I had baked aduki bean brownies. However, most of the other students had brought store-bought cookies, cakes, and fruits. After the ceremony, when we were about to leave. Mrs. Kazi said something to Mr. Kazi, who, at that time, everyone simply called by his first name, Sonam. Mr. Kazi told me that, in the future, I should always bring offerings that had been untouched, that the first fruits of every good thing should be offered first to the Gurus, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Dieties. I said that I was sorry if I had done something wrong. Then Mrs. Kazi said something else to her husband who then asked me if I had access to a car. I said yes, my parents owned two cars and my father went to work in the city by bus. Mr. Kazi said that they needed a car the next day to pick something up at JFK airport and asked if I would be willing to take them. I said yes but asked if I shouldn’t rather be saying mantram and doing the sadhana. Mr. Kazi then explained that, in Vajrayana Buddhism, doing whatever the Guru asked was practicing one’s sadhana.

So the next day I picked Mr. and Mrs. Kazi up at The Pavilion and drove out to the cargo section of JFK in Queens. It seemed that Mrs. Kazi had shipped a number of bales of Tibetan antiques, carpets, clothes, and other artefacts. The contents of these bales and boxes looked exactly like the contents of the Tibetan curio shops on Freak Street in Kathmandu or Janpath Lane in Delhi. It took a couple of hours to get all these goods through customs. Mr. Kazi translated for Mrs. Kazi, and more than once Mr. Kazi expressed his exasperation at something his wife asked him to do or say. By the time we left, the customs officers were also more than a little exasperated with Mrs. Kazi. When we got in the car and were driving back into the city, Mrs. Kazi started to ask me questions translated through her husband. She asked me about my family, about my being an only child, about my family’s business and history, where we were from, where I had gone to school, and what I had studied. I told her that my mother’s family had been an important family in New York since the 17th century and that a great, great uncle had even been mayor of New York. I also told her about going to Newark Academy and Middlebury. She asked me if I had been in the Army, and I told her about my stint in ROTC. Then she asked me why I was practicing Buddhism, what was my goal, and what I was willing to do to achieve that goal. At that, I told her that I was willing to do anything my Guru told me to do. Perhaps she wasn’t expecting that answer from a Westerner since she asked me the question again. Again I said that I was willing to anything to achieve enlightenment in this very lifetime. Mrs. Kazi seemed very pleased by that answer. In fact, from that moment on, Mrs. Kazi took a special interest in me.

When we got back to The Pavilion, I helped the doorman get all the boxes and bales upstairs into the Kazi’s apartment. The Pavilion was an up-scale residence where a lot of United Nations workers lived. As I learned over the next few weeks, the Kazis were subletting this apartment from its owner who was out of the country and all the furniture in the apartment belonged to these owners. When all the boxes and packages were stored in the Kazis’ and their daughter’s bedroom, Mrs. Kazi asked me if I would come early to their apartment the next day before sadhana. She wanted me to help her learn English. In return, said she would help me with my sadhana.

For the next couple of months, I would show up at the Kazis’ apartment an hour or more before sadhana. In theory, I was helping Mrs. Kazi practice her English. In fact, she was binding me closer and closer to her side. During one of our early conversations, Mrs. Kazi learned that I had spent a good bit of my previous life hunting and fishing. Killing other sentient beings is considered a source of bad karma in Buddhism. Mrs. Kazi said that I was a great sinner and that I had a lot of bad karma that I needed to cleanse. As I explained before, Milarepa had been my idol in terms of Buddhist practice and his guru had called him “Great Sinner” because he had killed a number of people with black magic which then he had had to undergo great trials to expiate. Therefore, in a strange kind of way I was happy to accept the idea that I was a great sinner who needed to undergo great penance, and Mrs. Kazi was more than willing to help me expiate this sin.

The next part of the sadhana was the Vajrasattva sadhana. This is a purification practice. If done correctly, it is believed that one can cleanse absolutely all bad karma accumulated from the beginning of time. Being a great sinner, as it were, I threw myself into this practice even more wholeheartedly, often reducing myself to tears by the power of my remorse and repentance. When doing the visualizations of this sadhana one tries to make them as real as possible. Having trained myself to sit in full lotus for hours and also to concentrate very strongly, I was able to do these visualizations with great vigor. I said one hundred thousand Vajrasattva mantram in three days and was given permission to go on to the mandala offering section. This was a prayer and visualization for generating great reservoirs of good karma, somewhat like the tshog ceremony, in a short period of time. I believe I also completed that part of the short ngon-dro in three days.

The last section of the short preliminary practice is called the Guru sadhana. One morning, when practicing the Vajra Guru mantra and visualizing myself as a naked, red dakini longing for union with the Guru, I was able to completely lose the distinction between my visualization and normal waking reality. In Buddhism, one is taught that one’s everyday life is nothing other than a dream, and I was able to experience this truth directly for myself. Ecstatically, I danced in my bone ornaments upon the corpse of illusory ego, a sow’s head protruding from the right side of my own, breasts swaying, and pudenda wet and open. For some time, this dakini body was as real as my own and the realm of the Vajra Guru as real as the den in which I was practicing. At first it felt like, having achieved this state of ecstasy, I could maintain it forever. However, as with acid, eventually and uncontrollably, I fell back to my usual beliefs. When I reported this experience to Mr. and Mrs. Kazi, they both smiled broadly and appeared very pleased. At that point, I figured I was well on my way towards enlightenment. (Little did I know.)

It took me a little over two weeks to finish the short preliminary sadhana written or revealed by H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche. By finish, I mean that it took me that long to say each of the five prayers or mantram 100,000 times. Mrs. Kazi was especially happy with my progress. One evening before sadhana, she moved my cushion up next to hers, symbolically turning me into the closest student. I was embarassed and yet thrilled by this. As I had gotten to know the other students, I was disdainful of what seemed to be their lack of perseverance and dedication. They had all been doing the sadhana for months longer than me, but most had not even finished the refuge. From my point of view, these people were dilettantes, not real yogis and yoginis. They were laypersons mired in the mud of samsara, lost in the drudgery of their mundane existence. I’m sure from their point of view, I was a privileged, arrogant up-start. After all, it was they who had mortgaged their homes to bring the Kazis to New York and put Jetsun Rinpoche in a posh private school in Westchester County. Nevertheless, there was no doubt in my mind that my practice was categorically different than the rest of these students. Therefore, I was more than willing to accept my role as heart-student.

However, on the home-front, my parents were pushing me to get a job. They had no concept of being a yogi, and especially a 23 year old yogi living at home. While they did not actively try to dissuade me from my practice, they let me know that I couldn’t continue living in their house unless I got a job. When I explained to Mr. Kazi that I would not be able to simply spend all my days doing sadhana, he was somewhat disappointed. My father got me a job for a family friend, Al Calderero. Remember, we lived in Bergen County, New Jersey. Mr. Calderero was a “made man,” a Mafioso, although my parents would not have said so. Al owned a small anodizing factory in the Meadowlands where he employed several Puerto Ricans. Al hired me to help out in this factory. He took me to the various factories for which he did work, introducing me around and showing me where to pick up and deliver things. He showed me how to operate the machinery, placing the aluminum in the acid baths and attaching the electrodes. Once I had a handle on the basic operations of the place, Al spent less and less time at the factory, leaving me as the de facto manager.

This went on for several weeks. Then one day the factory was visited by a number of other very Italian looking men Al’s age in shiny suits. Al and these men talked privately for some time. Latter that day, scores of cartons of imported Italian olive oil showed up on our loading dock. Al told me to load these up in the delivery van and follow him in his Cadillac. The delivery van was a rickety old step-van that always seemed on the verge of breaking down. The cartons of olive oil completely filled the back of the van which could hardly deal with so much weight. I followed Al’s Caddie to an Italian restaurant in Lyndhurst at which my parents sometimes ate. The owner of the restaurant met Al in the parking lot and they talked between themselves for some time. Then there was a handshake, after which Al told me to unload the cartons of olive oil from the van into the cellar of the restaurant. While I was doing this with the help of some of the restaurant dishwashers, Al drove off. When I was finished, the owner of the restaurant gave me a tip of a brand new $100 bill.

After work that evening, I was watching the news on TV with my mother just before supper. My father had not yet come home. The newscaster showed a picture of a semi-trailer which he said had been hijacked the night before in the Meadowlands of East Rutherford. The police were on the case, but no leads had yet turned up as to the whereabouts of all the cartons of imported olive oil. At dinner that night, I told my father that I knew something about the hijacked shipment of olive oil and explained to him how Al had had me drive the oil over to the particular restaurant. My father was pretty upset. At the time, he was the Police Commissioner on the Rutherford Town Council. Not only had Al jeopardized me, but he had compromised my father. The good news, however, was that my parents forbid me to work for Al and did not pester me about finding another job for several months. When I explained to the Kazis why I was no longer working, Mrs. Kazi was especially happy that I did not want to be any part of a criminal activity.

Having finished the short ngon-dro, I was the first of Mr. Kazi’s students to go on to what we referred to as the long ngon-dro. The Kazis belonged the the Longchen Nyingthig lineage of the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism. In the Longchen Nyingthig system, there are a 10 or so sadhanas which are to be completed in order, each one believed to be more spiritually potent and higher than the previous, each more and more capable of imparting enlightenment. The long ngon-dro also had the same five parts that had to be said one hundred thousand times each. However, each part, except for the Vajra Guru mantra, was made up of a four or more line prayer, and the Vajrasattva mantra was 100 syllable, not six. That meant that, even with full time practice, each section took weeks, not days, and at least one took months.

In addition, Mr. and Mrs. Kazi decided that I should do 100,000 full or long prostrations. I had seen Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal doing such prostrations as part of their preliminary practices. Typically, they did their prostrations on special wooden boards in which grooves had been worn by the practitioners’ hands as they slid forward to lay themselves out prostrate on their stomachs over and over and over again. All of Mr. Kazi’s other students were only doing short prostrations. This meant kneeling down on the ground and touching one’s head to the floor while saying a longer refuge prayer:

Namo Lama-la kyab-su chi-wo I take refuge in the Guru
Sang-gyay-la kyab-su chi-wo I take refuge in the Buddha
Cho-la kyab-su chi-wo I take refuge in the Dharma
Ge-dun-la kyab-su chi-wo I take refuge in the Sangha

Mr. Kazi said that I should do long prostration because I had the time and energy, it was the correct thing to do, and would also be better when and if I became a guru in my own right. Mrs. Kazi said I needed to do the long prostrations because I was such a big sinner. Therefore, I went out to a lumber yard in East Rutherford and bought a four by eight foot piece of plywood which I hauled upstairs to my meditation room and put down over my parents’ wall to wall carpet. Every day I spent one and half to two hours prostrating myself to my make-shift altar, visualizing the tshog-shing or assembled gurus and deities, and reciting this longer refuge prayer. One hundred thousand and more long prostrations took me more than half a year to complete, much of them done during the heat of summer in a non-airconditioned second story room. Every day I had to steel myself to this practice. Half way through I would be drenched in sweat, willing myself with grim determination to stand back up and throw myself back down yet one more time. I rubbed my knees raw from kneeling on the hard surface in pools of my own sweat and raised a permanent bump on my forehead where I knocked it against the prostration board trying to expiate all the bad karma Mrs. Kazi kept reminding me that I had generated in my life.

Thus my days for the next several months were spent doing sadhana, unless Mr. or Mrs. Kazi needed me to do something for them, and my evenings were either spent doing sadhana at home or going to sadhana at the Kazi’s apartment in the city. Every Sunday, the group would hold tshog at one or another’s apartment or home. I became the Kazis’ chaffeur for these outings. Jetsun Rinpoche would come home from boarding school in Ardesly, NY each weekend and I would be entrusted with driving her back to school every Sunday night. This gave me a great opportunity to get to know Jetsun Rinpoche. Although she was only 15 and I was 23, Jetsun could hold her own in any conversation, and more than once put me in my place. However, Jestun Rinpoche did not seem very interested in being a tulku, a reincarnate lama, a rinpoche or “precious one.” She said that she wanted to be a photo journalist, and she often had to be cajoled and coerced by her mother to pray or perform other religious observations, at least in front of Westerners whom she did not seem to hold in very high esteem. Previously I mentioned that, at the first sadhana I had attended, there had been an empty cushion right next to the altar to which Mrs. Kazi had offered the first cup of tea. This turned out to be Jetsun Rinpoche’s seat or “throne.” When Mrs. Kazi was able to get Jetsun Rinpoche to sit on that seat, she would keep her head bowed, hiding behind the fall of her hair, her face turned towards the wall. Later she would disappear into her bedroom at the first opportunity.

On one Sunday, it was my turn to have tshog at my parents’ house. Because my room in the den was too small to fit everyone, Mrs. Kazi set up an altar in the living room and I had to take the cushions off all the chairs and couches and place them on the floor. Mrs. Kazi asked my parents if they wanted to attend. However, they preferred to watch television out on the back porch. I can only wonder what they thought of the chanting, the bells and damarus, small two-headed ritual drums, and all the other exotica of a Tibetan Buddhist tshog. When the ceremony was over and I was getting ready to drive the Kazis back into the city, Mrs. Kazi said thank you to my parents. By now Mrs. Kazi was able and willing to speak English on her own, if often very creatively. She told my parents that I was a very good student and that she appreciated me very much. She also said that she understood how special I must be to my parents as an only child since she also only a had one daughter.

On another Sunday, a middle-aged man and woman came to tshog whom I had not seen before. They brought with them a half life-size statue of a famous Sikkimese Nyingmapa saint. The statue that normally was the centerpiece of our altar was a very old statue of Guru Padmasambhava given to Mr. Kazi by the Dalai Lama in remembrance of Mr. Kazi’s many years of acting as Dalai Lama’s personal translator. Mr. Kazi put this large statue on the altar and appeared to pay it great respect. The couple stayed for the tshog, but they were more intellectually curious than serious about practicing. I believe the man was some kind of academic at NYU. At the end of the ceremony, I and a couple of the other chelas or students rode down in the elevator with this couple. They said that Mr. Kazi seemed like a very special man. I said he was not just special but that he was a realized being, a Buddha in the flesh. The remaining floors we rode in somewhat uncomfortable silence. Some time later, Mr. Kazi mentioned that some people had once suggested that he was a tulku or reincarnation of the Sikkimese saint memorialized by the statue. (Many years later, I was told by another student who had gone with Mr. Kazi to visit Chatral Rinpoche in Nepal that it was Chatral Rinpoche who had recognized Mr. Kazi as the reincarnation of Lhatsun Namkha Jigme.)

[This is as far as we go with this story, at least for now. Bottom line, I'm still mucking about in the samsara of my own making, still "journeying towards the East."]