Today is the anniversary of my teacher Drupon’s death. This has got me thinking about the yogis and yoginis among us.
Yogis are knowledge holders that do not play by the same rules as traditional society. In monastic communities, they may wear monk or nun robes, but they may also have long hair in topknots. Some of them are married.
I remember years ago when one of my monk friends was preparing me for meeting a very revered yogi.
“This yogi is not like the others that you have met. He has been known to make gruff comments and do strange things. Once, some practitioners brought their altar statues for him to bless. He took the statues and would not give them back.”
My friend continued with his warnings.
“Once when I was translating for his teachings, he was talking about the beautiful ladies who were there, encouraging me to date them.”
When I entered this yogi’s room and knelt before him, asking for his blessing, he smiled and said something gruff in Tibetan. My friend neither responded to him, nor did he translate the comment for me. The yogi then grasped his mala beads, tapping them on my head as he began chanting. When he was finished, I needed help walking back to my guest house. I fell sick in the days after and had to change my travel plans to stay at the monastery for another two weeks.
“Good! I prayed you would be able to stay for the remainder of the teachings,” Drupon said as I passed him on the path to the monastery a few days after I had recovered.
Even Drupon lived by a different set of ways. When I met him, he wore monk robes but he had long hair in a topknot. He was beautiful, like a woman, with soft features and long eyelashes. He told me of the time when he was visiting a town in India and was waiting in line at the post office. Women were always pushed to the front of the line so that they could get home quickly. Someone pushed him to the front of the line, thinking he was a woman. He replied in a falsetto voice “Thank you very much!”
And then there was the time when he wanted to teach the rickshaw drivers a lesson after learning that they had been cheating foreigners with unfair rates. At the airport, he spoke to them in proper English.
“I am a Tibetan who was raised in the US, and I don’t speak Hindi. Please, can you help me get to the monastery?”
Drupon then watched as the rickshaw drivers discussed in Hindi the extreme rates they planned to charge him for transportation. Drupon just replied with a nod and a smile before getting into the rickshaw. After arriving at his destination, Drupon asked the driver for the keys to the rickshaw. The driver handed them to the smiling Drupon somewhat reluctantly but also thinking that Drupon must be asking to bless them.
“You have just sold me a rickshaw for 900 rupees. Should I call the police, or should you? How dare you treat foreign visitors in this way!” Drupon replied in perfect Hindi.
Then there are the yogis who are the outcasts. There are old stories of yogis who lived in the mountains, those who would walk around completely naked, and those would sometimes make lude comments to passing pilgrims.
The great Gedun Chopel was considered mad for most of his lifetime. He spent time in a Tibetan jail and would take his clothes off in public places, speaking deliriously about love. While once a monk, he devoted the later part of his life to learning to love and please women as an expression of his devotion. He kept carful records of his learnings so that he could share them with others, yet no one cared to read them until long after his death.
And the great, late, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, while revered, was also a bit of a rabble rouser. He was known to drink heavily and be sexually free, but he was also known to give profound teachings.
There are stories about how Trungpa Rinpoche used to sit outside of bars in his car and shout obscenities to drunkards as they would leave the bar for the night. When they would come to his car window aiming to fight, Trungpa would squirt them in the face with a water gun. It is said that these interactions produced awakenings for those who approached him.
And once, Trungpa Rinpoche asked his disciples to come to his house and bring all of their pot. His disciples did so, thinking that they were going to party together, but Trungpa took their pot and burned it in his fireplace instead, telling them that they needed to clean up their act to be taken seriously.
We often revere that which appears “civilized,” examples of a purity that we one day hope to embody. Clean vs unclean. Holy vs evil. Pure vs impure. Our tongues get so caught up in the perfect recitations of the mantras that we sometimes forget to see the sacred that appears in the spaces between the words.
Once when I was staying at a monastery in northern India, I met a young man who I was told was enthroned as a Rinpoche. He dressed in plain clothes and smelled strongly of BO. I was told that he was abused by his parents as a child and after living a hard youth, he was now his own kind of nomad; allowed to take the bus for free wherever he wanted, he moved from place to place like a homeless man. Once he came to my guest room for tea. He grabbed the mangos that I had ripening on the windowsill and threw them out the window at the villagers three stories below who were circumambulating the monastery.
“Sometimes, very high masters choose to be reincarnated into lives that are especially difficult,” a great teacher once told me. “They do this both out of compassion, so that someone else doesn’t have to take those troubled lives, but also because these kinds of lives are the best for training the mind through such difficulties.”
I thought of the homeless and downtrodden people who have crossed my path. I wondered if they could be yogis in disguise.
Tonight, Sophia sits on my couch. She is professing her belief in Allah, because she overdosed once and she prayed to Allah for help. Then she survived. She sits uncomfortably now, having just survived a different terrible situation. She clutches her tarot cards to her chest.
“Do you think Allah will punish me for using them? I wonder if Allah keeps track of the things I do that are evil”
I don’t know the answer any more than she does, but I speak honestly, “Allah does not make shit.”
If Allah created everything, there is no one who is unworthy, nothing that is evil. Perhaps there are only tools that we can use for good or otherwise. Like a hammer or a sword. Or a thought. Or a word.
“Things that are truly beneficial for you will also benefit others. Maybe it is your intentions that are most important.” I tell her.
Sophia takes a deep breath and smiles.
©Cardinal Speaks
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