Monthly Archives: June 2011

A Retreat with Anam Thubten Rinpoche

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I recently heard the results of a poll that I found surprising: 50% of Americans report having had a “spiritual experience,” but of that group, 80% say they never want to have another. That was exactly the opposite of the 70 or 80 people who gathered on Saturday for a daylong retreat with Anam Thubten Rinpoche, sponsored by the Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group.

Anam Thubten Rinpoche

Rinpoche is a Tibetan word meaning, “precious one,” and is usually only applied to those recognized as reincarnations of spiritual leaders or teachers of the past, most famously, the current 14th Dalai Lama.

I first attended a retreat with Anam Thubten in December, 2005 and have been fortunate enough to get to a half-dozen more since then, for his home and teaching center, the  Dharmata Foundation in Point Richmond, CA, is not far away.  In the years since I first heard him, the clarity, resonance, and joy contained in his teachings have brought him greater renown:  his book, No Self, No Problem, originally published by the Dharmata Foundation, has been picked up by Snow Lion Press (a self-publishing success story!), and he was chosen to kick off the ongoing series of online retreats at Tricycle.com

In my own efforts to write of the concept of no-self last December, I quoted Anam Thubten for his simple, experiential way of presenting the concept:  “this ‘I’ is a fictitious entity that is always ready to whither away the moment we stop sustaining it.  We don’t have to go to a holy place to experience this.  All we have to do is simply sit and pay attention to our breath, allowing ourselves to let go of all our fantasies and mental images”

It should be clear that any culture like Tibet, that believes in Rinpoches, is not using the concept of “no-self” to tell us we don’t exist or that life does not continue after death.  In Anam Thubten’s vision, “no-self” means an end to the painful illusion of seperation, an end to isolation, an end to living in a friend-or-foe, fight-or-flight world.

Yet although he mentioned this concept, which first drew me to his teachings, on Saturday he had a different focus, “Primordial Mind,” the unconditioned and indefinable base of what we are, prior to concepts, prior to ego, prior to all delusions.  The experience of this spacious mind is surprisingly near if we are willing to let go of fixed concepts, and practice a simple meditation technique, and if we are motivated by devotion, by longing for union with the absolute the way a thirsty man longs for water.

Anam Thubten’s book elaborates the concepts we need to let go  of as well as his favorite meditation practice – the simple but difficult art of learning to relax and let go of effort, even the effort to meditate “well.”  This longing – for God or the guru or Buddha; for oneness, or emptiness or, selflessness, or enlightenment – however we conceive of the ultimate good, is finally a longing for love, he said, and this is what remains when our fixed ideas break down.  In Anam Thubten’s teaching, God is love, or Buddha Nature is love, as it is in the words of many other spiritual masters.

My description is close to being new-agey, which is why Anam Thubten is the teacher and I am not.  He didn’t gloss over the difficulty and struggles involved in a serious spiritual search, and in his quiet and understated way he noted that if one is not receptive, “this talk will be very strange.”

In the end, it is the person of the teacher himself that does the convincing.  Is this person really what he seems – genuinely centered, full of peace and compassion?  I believe Anam Thubten really is a man of peace and joy and I trust his message that what he has found is accessible to anyone willing to look and make the effort.   More information and his teaching schedule can be found at the Dharmata Foundation website,  http://www.dharmatafoundation.com/

Dharmata is a word that means, “the way things truly are.”

The Ballad of Jesse James

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It’s easy to see why I was drawn to the Ballad of Jesse James as a kid; the song paints Jesse as an American Robin Hood:

Jesse James was a lad, he killed many a man,
He robbed the Glendale train.
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He’d a hand, and a heart, and a brain.

Jesse James

Not surprisingly, singers who have covered this ballad include Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen.  The song also has those elements of mystery I believe are central to stories that take up permanent residence in imagination:

Oh, Jesse had a wife who mourned for his life,
Three children they were brave,
But that dirty little coward, that shot Mr. Howard,
Has laid Jesse James in his grave.

The notes in the book of ballads I found as a kid explained that “Howard” was the alias Jesse James used when he married, settled down, and tried to leave his life of crime behind.  The dirty little coward was Robert Ford a friend of Jesse, who shot him as he straightened a picture on the wall of his home.  Something in us recoils at that and wants to know how Ford could do it.  We know in our bones why Dante assigned traitors to the lowest circle of Hell.  I am not the only one who wonders, for the story has been dramatized several times, most recently in 2007, when Brad Pitt played Jesse in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

With Jesse James we get to witness a legend in formation, for unlike the Child ballads, this story is just over a hundred years old.  We can see how imagination shapes facts the way the ocean smooths pebbles, and something in us prefers the legend – we want to know who the heroes and villains are and we want them larger than life.  If you are like me, you’ll be disappointed to learn that no historical record shows the James gang ever using its loot to benefit anyone but themselves.

Jesse James, (1847-1882), and his older brother Frank, came of age during an especially bloody phase of the Civil War – the guerilla conflicts that raged across the border state of Missouri.  The James brothers rode with William Quantrill, one of the most notorious guerillas; we would call him a terrorist now.  Sixteen year old Jesse joined Quantrill in 1864, and supposedly took part in the Centralia massacre, where the band killed 22 unarmed Union troops then scalped and dismembered them.

After the war, Missouri freed its slaves, but forbade ex-Confederate soldiers from voting, serving on juries or even preaching from pulpits; it was a fertile ground for outlaws.  The James brothers joined with Cole, John, Jim, and Bob Younger, and went on decade long spree of robberies that spread from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia.  John Newman Edwards, an editor of the Kansas City Times, published Jesse’s letters and presented him as a symbol of Confederate resistance to Reconstruction.  The James-Younger gang was adept at publicity, often hamming it up before crowds during escapes from stagecoach and bank robberies.  Because they took safes and strongboxes and did not rob passengers, Edwards’s editorials painted Jesse as Robin Hood.

Jesse James dime novel cover

The Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired in 1874 to stop the James-Younger gang, and after numerous setbacks, Allan Pinkerton took on the case as a personal vendetta.  In 1875 he staged a raid on the James homestead and threw an incendiary device into the home.  It exploded, killing Jesse’s half-brother, and blowing off one of his mother’s arms.  This, more than any editorial, won public sympathy for Jesse James.  A bill granting the James and Younger brothers complete amnesty was narrowly defeated in the Missouri legislature.

Jesse married his cousin Zee in 1874, and two of their children survived to adulthood.  The downfall of the gang came in 1876, when they raided the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota.  All of the Younger brothers were killed or captured.  Only Frank and Jesse escaped.

Jesse tried to live quietly with his wife after that, in a home near St. Joseph, but he invited Charley Ford, a former gang member, to move in with the family for protection, and Charley brought in his younger brother Bob.  Both Ford brothers had been in contact with the governor of Missouri about his reward for Jesse, dead or alive.    One day, in 1882, as the three men were getting ready to leave for a robbery, as Jesse stopped to clean dust from a picture on the wall, Bob Ford shot him twice in the back of the head.

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Memory, both individual and collective, is always mixed with imagination, increasingly so with the passage of time.  And if ours is not an era that treats the reputation of heroes well, at least we grasp human complexity.  Could Jesse James have been a loving father and a cold blooded killer and sympathetic to the poor?  Of course.  What was he really like?  We are never going to know, and besides, if there was a simple answer, I would not still be researching the legend and listening to the song.  Here is Pete Seeger’s version: