Sat, 20 Sep 2008
Traga Rinpoche
I had my first chance to attend a teaching by Traga Rinpoche today. It was down at the Drikung Mahayana Center, in other words, Su Su's house. which is in Gaithersberg, a very nice suburb of Washington. The house was equally nice. It was the first time I'd been there. For some reason I had the idea it was on top of a hill. It was not. Maybe someone told me that there was a hill behind it. We all listened to Traga Rinpoche in the living room. Su Su showed a lot of hospitality to all of us. Trag Rinpoche's teaching was on the four schools of BUddhist philosophy in India. The names, translated into English, are the Commentary School, the Sutro Followers School, the Mind Only School, and the Middlemost School. The idea that there were four schools of Indian Buddhist philosophy is a Tibetan conceptual scheme. Reality, as always, is not so neat and clear. Anyway, it was a high level overview of the schools, since we only had four hours to cover them. But it was a more detailed look than I've heard before at a teaching. Usually this sort of discussion is difficult to translate. We were lucky to have a khenpo serving as Traga Rinpoche's translator.
We ate lunch with Rinpoche and Khenpo (part of the hospitality I mentioned) and Khenpo told a Tibetan joke. Two Tibetan lamas were traveling together and stopped to make soup for their dinner. Their provisions were short and there was only enough soup to satisfy one person. One lama, scheming to have all of the soup for himself, took out his dirty thigh bone trumpet and and used it to stir the soup. He apologized, saying, "I am a yogi beyond the concepts of clean and unclean." The second lama kicked over the pot of soup saying, "And I am a yogi who is beyond concern."
