Blue Sky, White Clouds

Below is the approximate script, with possible errors, of the fifth episode in the Double Dorje podcast, released on 28 May 2024 at  the Double Dorje podcast . Hello good people, and a warm welcome again to the Double Dorje podcast.  Through an unusual coincidence, which I’ll get to later, I heard of the sad passing of Ato Rinpoche shortly before the news spread across the Internet. But not all you good listeners will have heard of Ato, so while you can search the Internet, of course, I’ll tell you just a little a bit about him. He was born in 1933 which, by the way, tells you that he was 91 when he passed the other day. He was recognised as the main tulku, for which the usual gloss is “reincarnate lama”, of his monastery at Ato, not far from Jeykundo, or Yushu as the Chinese call it, in eastern Tibet. When I say “not far”, that is in terms relevant to the time and place. How many days horseride it was, I don’t know. Perhaps a couple? Maybe less, as he did say that they would ...

It is not yet a quite a year since Thrangu Rinpoche passed on, just short of his 90th birthday. And while it could not remotely be said that I was any kind of "close" student of his, I would claim that he was very important to me. I first met him in 1979 in what I recall as an up-market apartment in Compayne  Gardens, London, where he gave a White Tars empowerment and teachings to the packed assembly, and a few weeks later when he gave the Karma Pakshi empowerment in Edgbaston, Birmingham. At that time, all I knew was that he was an important teacher in the Karma Kagyu scheme of things, but I had no idea quite how important. We sat around casually in the back room of Karma Ling in Carlyle Road, chatting. IIRC Peter Roberts interpreted. I do remember we students struggling to grasp the shape of a "chöjung", and fashioning one from carboard cut from a breakfast cereal box. Sprayed with red paint (I had a rusty old red car parked outside, but I'll refrain from rela...

 This is an approximate script (with errors) of the Double Dorje podcast at  the Double Dorje podcast Hello, and let me begin by extending a very warm welcome to the Double Dorje podcast. And now… I bow down to the Lama. A lot of Buddhist texts, liturgies and philosophical discourses, start with those words or something very similar. Instead of the lama it might be Buddha, it might be Vajrasattva, it might be the three jewels or the three roots. But the fact that it is often the lama shows just how important the lama is in Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism has even been called Lamaism. The history of that term is rather interesting. It was probably invented by, and was certainly popularised by, Lawrence Waddell, whose book, entitled “The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism”, was one of the first sources to tell the white Western world anything about the Buddhism of Tibet. It was published in 1895, making it about 130 years old. He was something of an explorer and acquired quite...