An Exquisite Calm
The religion of Tibet is alive and well in Nuuanu Valley, where two lamas teach meditation and help others to find the peace and compassion that they exude
By Chad Pata
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Lama Tempa Gyeltshen leads Lisa Waikailani and Gil
Evans in a meditation class at Kagyu Thegchen Ling
They say with age comes wisdom, and as Honolulu’s senior resident Lama Karma Rinchen turns 75, he has it in spades.
Thirty years after first setting foot in the Islands he is still dispensing wisdom, leading the Buddhist community and campaigning for funds to build a new temple. Though his body may have slowed with the years, his mind is still as sharp as the Himalayan peaks he once called home.
“People’s problems are like boiling water,” says Rinchen, in his halting English during an interview at Kagyu Thegchen Ling, the Tibetan Buddhist meditation center in Nuuanu. “I can put the cool water in the boiling water and then it is not boiling. That is my job.”
His road to this job is an astonishing one. Born in a mountain-top village in Eastern Tibet, he was the son of a wealthy merchant, with little to want for in an otherwise poor country.
But by age 7, when kids in America are just beginning to understand the benefits of their parents’ wealth, Rinchen cast it aside to join the monastery. There he learned to read and write and became fascinated with the village lama - a living Buddha according to Tibetan Buddhist belief.
He admired the lama’s ability to help others, and at age 11 set out on foot for the monastery of Palpung where he would be taught the philosophies of Buddha. Once schooled in the ways Buddha, he began his mandatory three-year meditation retreat.
“Before the retreat, your mind is hard like thorns,” says Rinchen, flashing his impossibly large smile. “After retreat, your mind is soft like cotton.”
In his three years away, he says, he recited more than 1 million mantras while learning to train his mind and find peace. But while his mind found it, the world around him took no such retreats.
The Chinese invaded Tibet in 1959, running the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s head of state, and hundreds of his followers over the Himalayas into India. Thousands of Buddhists were tortured and killed by the Chinese, monks and nuns were forced to have sex in public squares. There was no room in communism for religion, and Rinchen was forced to transverse treacherous mountain paths alone in order to follow the Dalai Lama into exile.
“With the Communist, you cannot talk to your mom, mom cannot talk to their children,” says Rinchen, who did not get to see a single family member again until 1981. “Communist are very strong, you know.”
In India, he worked for the Tibetan government-in-exile and assisted in the building of a monastery for his former retreat master Kalu Rinpoche. He spent nearly 20 years in exile before Rinpoche came to him with the idea of a new home for Rinchen in America.
The 1960s and the “hippie” movement had opened the West’s mind to the idea of meditation, and Rinpoche planned to open 12 Dharma (the teachings of Buddha) centers in Europe and America.
But as with anything in America, not even enlightenment comes for free.
“My teacher come here (Hawaii) two times and they ask for meditation master,” recalls Rinchen.
“My teacher asks why the hip-pies want a master, ‘cause they like to sit and no like to have a job. So he asked them, ‘Do you have job, do you have house?’ They say ‘No,’ and he said, ‘You want a teacher, you have to give food, you have to give the place to live.‘So they saved their money and sent for me.”
Upon arriving in Hawaii he was greeted by Phillip Dutcher, who recounts the meeting in the preface of Rinchen’s book The Story of All of Us Simply Said.
“He had only two small carry-on bags with him, and I carried both of them from the arrival area to the parking lot,” writes Dutcher, who also served as editor for the book. “The small bags were quite heavy. I later found out that inside of each was a statue of the Buddha, his daily practice books, a few ritual implements and a change of underwear.”
Three decades of American capitalism has not changed Rinchen, who still prides himself on the simplicity of his life.
“A person who is a monk has no needs, just clothes, that’s all,” says Rinchen. “What they have is contentment.”
This is not to say he is a clothes horse, for the only thing he can
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