This is the second and final installment of a talk that Hannah Nydahl gave at a course on H.H. the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje in Leverkusen, Germany in 2005. Part I appeared in Buddhism Today No. 20. This portion continues to tell the story of how she and Lama Ole Nydahl first met Karma Kagyu Tibetan Buddhism in the late 1960s and how the 16th Karmapa worked with them for development of mind and bringing Diamond Way Buddhism to the West.
Hannah Nydahl spent over thirty years doing just this. She saw it as her and Lama Ole’s responsibility, simply their specific function in this time or epoch, “to make the deep wisdom of Tibet accessible to our part of the world,” as she once said. She died on April 1, 2007.
This article, in its two parts, is a tribute to her work. Buddhism Today is extremely grateful to Claudia Balara for her careful and intense work in translating this article from the German and preparing it for publication here.
Since we could not stay in Rumtek, we agreed that the best thing we could do was to go to Sonada, where Kalu Rinpoche was. Lopon Tsechu Rinpoche had already told us about the lama who sometimes taught Westerners. Although Sonada was only half a day trip from Rumtek, we were very, very sad that things weren’t progressing in Rumtek and that we were sent there. Kalu Rinpoche had a few students around him and they had started to practice. The time had come where we would actually start to learn something.
Kalu Rinpoche gave teachings for about one hour every day. It started out with, “What does refuge mean? What is karma?” and, “What are the Paramitas?” This lasted for many months, during which time we also started on our Ngondro. But the whole time we were staying there, we really wanted to go to Sikkim to be with Karmapa.
Already at that time, there was quite a difference from being with Karmapa or being with Kalu Rinpoche, being the student of one or the other. The people in Sonada were students of Kalu Rinpoche and he always made it clear that we were students of Karmapa. We didn’t really know what that meant at that time, but Rinpoche was always very kind to us. One day he told us that Karmapa was going to Bhutan and there was a possibility to meet him. We went off immediately and met Karmapa at the Teeshta Bridge when he came down from Rumtek. He then took us all the way to Bhutan with him. Illegally, he hid us in his truck.
The deeper we got into the practice, the stronger our bond to Karmapa became. He was our connection to the dharma and we gradually started to gain more and more understanding.
I would like to tell you a little more about how he worked with us. His method was to throw us in the water and we simply had to learn how to swim. One day in Rumtek, for example, he called us and asked, “Do you have a driver’s licence?” And when we said “Yes,” he said, “Okay, then we are going to Nepal. We don’t have enough drivers. So why don’t you drive a car?”
You have to know that driving a jeep in Asia is very different from driving a car in the West. First of all, they drive on the left side of the road. The jeeps were really old and the roads in the Nepali mountains back then were even worse than they are today. So we drove all the way from Rumtek to Kathmandu.
I do not think I ever had such a hard drive in my whole life. It was terrible! Ole was in one car and I was driving one of the other jeeps. It took one and a half days of constant driving. We stopped once to get some sleep, but during the day we drove non-stop on bad roads, up the mountains. And then Ole had the accident.
I was driving the car behind him and I saw Ole’s car in the front going faster and faster. And it didn’t stop when we were going in the curves, but I just stayed behind him, having no idea what was going on. Then he suddenly drove into the side of the mountain! (Laughs.) It looked very dangerous. The road was really steep. I stopped and Ole got out of the car. He said that the brakes had entirely failed and he couldn’t stop the car anymore.
Luckily Ole was at the wheel, because he was able to handle the situation. Karmapa had been in another car further up front, and of course the whole convoy stopped. The Tibetans still talk about it to this day, because Ole had the lama who was holding the black crown sitting next to him and had just started to say Karmapa Chenno mantras, thinking of Karmapa.
Karmapa came over and we debated what to do. After all, we were in the middle of the mountains. Ole suggested tying the car to another car. Karmapa was there during our discussion, checking everything out. It was a crazy thing to do, all sorts of things could have gone wrong, but it seemed like the only feasible solution. Ole would sit in the car by himself and it would be pulled.
Karmapa came over to me and wanted to know whether I thought it was a good idea. I asked him back, “What do you think?” Because we trusted him so much, we were totally confident that he knew exactly what was going on. If he would give the go ahead, it would work out. He said, “Okay” and so we went on and nothing happened. But it was crazy!
Karmapa would constantly check our trust in him. Something would happen and he would always want our feedback and find out how far we would go, how far our trust would go. Some of these things we only understood after many years. For example, when we met him the first time, we gave him some LSD, in our eyes the best gift. He politely accepted it. Many years later he talked to other people about it, saying that LSD is not good but he accepted it from us because he knew that then we wouldn’t take it. When Karmapa gave us the refuge and lay promise, he only asked us for one thing; that from now on, we weren’t allowed to take any LSD anymore, because we took the promise not to take any intoxicants.
His blessing was so powerful that from that moment we never even thought of LSD again. It just vanished from our minds, when before it was the thing. We didn’t believe in any other drugs and had stopped smoking hash, but we had still believed in LSD. From that moment, we never thought of it again. Whatever Karmapa said, whatever he blessed, would immediately work without any hesitation.
When he gave us teachings, it was never in a formal way, but they were essential teachings. He would suddenly ask what we thought about different things. We would answer and then started thinking how to improve the answer to make it sound more intelligent. But Karmapa wouldn’t listen anymore, he just said: “First thought, best thought!” That was his level of teaching, very direct and not conceptual in any way.
Sometimes I had to translate for Karmapa, which was quite tricky and very different from translating for anyone else. I had learned the alphabet before, so this came in very handy when we stayed in Sonada and did our Ngondro because the texts were in Tibetan and there was no translator. This is how I started. We got hold of a dictionary and with my knowledge of the alphabet, I could read the dictionary and then translate everything word by word. When we did prostrations, I translated the text and we did our 100,000 repetitions. Then we came to the next part and I translated that. We really started from scratch and learned in that way, and slowly we also started to gain more and more understanding.
After a few years, we had been coming and going to Sikkim and had finished our Ngondro. Karmapa called us up to him one day and told us, “Okay, now you go home.” “Home? Where is home?” We thought that we would be there forever. We had even given him our passports at some point and we thought that was it. Then he said, “Yes, now its time for you to go home. There are other people who will like to hear about what you have been learning here.”
He gave us a thangka (scroll painting) of the three main bodhisattvas: Loving Eyes, Wisdom Buddha, and Diamond in Hand. He said, “You will need compassion, wisdom, and strength. I will give them to you symbolically in this picture and that is what you will take with you when you go back [to Europe].” So he sent us to the West and said, “I will send Kalu Rinpoche first, so he can prepare the way. He has done the same when we came from Tibet. And then I will come.”
So we went back to Europe in the autumn of 1972. We prepared everything the way he had told us to, and in 1974 Karmapa came for the first time himself. He arrived in Oslo and we had prepared a car for him. You may have seen films of Karmapa being welcomed in the US. All we had was our small VW bus, painted, with nice curtains and nice cushions. And that’s how we picked him and the crew up from the airport. We spent a little time with him in Oslo and then went over to Stockholm.
It was there when I had a dream about my mother. I went to Karmapa and told him about her. He didn’t say much. He just took it in. A little later, I was sitting in a room with Karmapa in a place in Sweden where we had started a center with Kalu Rinpoche. Someone suddenly brought in a telephone. It was Ole’s mother who told me that my mother had just died. She had a heart attack, so it was a sudden death. Karmapa was sitting next to me, so he immediately got the message and said, “Your mother is very lucky!” He told me that she had a connection with him and that she had died in this moment was very auspicious. Karmapa immediately held a ceremony for my mother. One could not wish for a better death. Of course it was difficult, but to have Karmapa there at that moment and let him take her through, that was very special.
Right after that we went to Copenhagen, where he gave the Black Crown Ceremony for the first time in Europe. At that time nobody knew what Buddhism was or who Karmapa was, but 2000 people came, among them my father. My parents had spent their whole life together and such a sudden death is always difficult for the one who is left behind. My father was invited to come and Karmapa really looked after him, explaining to him how happy my mother was now. Of course that was difficult for my father, who wasn’t a Buddhist, to understand and to accept, but it helped him anyway.
Karmapa gave my mother a lot of attention. A few days after the Black Crown Ceremony, he gave an empowerment especially for my mother: Almighty Ocean (Tibetan: Gyalwa Gyamtso), the red form of Loving Eyes in union. She had a strong connection to him. Even when she was still alive, she was very open to Buddhism.
Through Ole’s and my first hippie years and the times in prison, she was the one who was always the most understanding and who often saved the situation when things were difficult. Before Karmapa came, she already had a premonition. The last time I saw her, she told me what I should do when she died. So there was this very very close connection between them. The way Karmapa took care of things with my mother was very kind. Later, it was the same with Ole’s parents and my father. He even came to our homes. He was caring and very compassionate on all levels.
As mentioned earlier, Karmapa’s way of teaching us was by throwing us in the water and we simply had to swim. I have experienced that with him several times. One time, I think it was in 1977, we were driving with Karmapa and the whole group from Denmark to Holland in a bus. There must have been a real draft, because when we arrived I was really ill with what I later found out to be pyelitis. The Buddhist center was a tower and Ole and I were staying on the top floor of the tower. Karmapa was staying somewhere else. I was really sick. I had fever and cramps. It was incredibly painful. In order to go to the toilet, one had to walk down six floors. I really thought I was dying. I never had anything like that before and I had no idea what it was.
They had planned a program with Karmapa for the evening, a Karma Pakshi empowerment, and I was supposed to translate. Karmapa called me to him and I literally crawled to him. He smiled and said, “It is okay. Where does it hurt?” I showed him where, he blew on it and said, “Okay, so you go to the hospital, but first we have the empowerment!” So the empowerment took place and I translated for him. I don’t know how I managed to get through.
Even under normal circumstances, translating for Karmapa was totally different from translating for anyone else because he taught in a quite unusual way. At that time I had just started to translate and usually the teachings I translated were quite structured. I had learned a little bit about dharma by then and could follow the thoughts. You heard some words and translated them, and it made sense.
When Karmapa taught, he would speak very poetically and not follow any structure. It would seem like he had no idea of what he was talking about. And you could not use your normal intellectual way of translating. It just didn’t work. The only chance was to forget everything and just try to tune in to him, to trust that he would somehow be able to work through you and the right things would come out.
During the empowerment, Karmapa explained what to visualize and how some details appeared. There is a part in the Karma Pakshi empowerment about the nature of the mind that is usually never explained by any of the lamas, Karmapa included. But on that day, Karmapa started teaching about the nature of mind. It was a part of the Word Empowerment where the teacher uses Mahamudra words, which then, click, make you understand mind. On that day he actually taught that and I had to translate it. I’m very grateful. It was another of his skillful means.
In an extreme situation like that, one does not function in a normal way. You can only do it if you understand the teachings intuitively, that is the only way. He gave me this incredible blessing and I managed to make it. I don’t know what I said, but it was okay and everything was all right. After the empowerment I was taken to the hospital. Karmapa could put you in the most extreme situations, and then teach you something. He did that a lot.
Quite a few people were actually slightly afraid of Karmapa because he was so powerful. When he was laughing, the whole house was laughing. When he frowned, it was the end of the world. I had moments like that as well, where it would be almost too much for me. That was part of the purifications. At other times when he expressed his compassion, everything he did was out of compassion anyway, but when he showed it in the loving way, he would melt everybody’s heart. And people, whether they were Buddhists or not, would get the blessing.
Once I was driving a car and Karmapa was with me. We had to go from Frankfurt all the way down to Austria. It was a van and it was very slow. It just had no power. No matter how much I stepped on the pedal, nothing really happened.
We already knew at that time that Karmapa loved to drive fast. And I had to drive him in this car, so I knew from the beginning it would be a disaster. So I was driving and then he started looking at me. I started to ask him some questions and after a little while he asked me to stop the car because he wanted to sit in the back seat. (Laughs.) I kept on driving.
At some point when we were going uphill and were even slower, he suddenly said, “Now pass!” And I just couldn’t. It would have taken forever to pass the car in front of us and I had no chance of seeing if anyone would be coming from the other direction. Karmapa really tried to make me do it and I just didn’t know what to do. I had them all in the car and if something happened, it would have been terrible. At the same time, he told me to do it. But before we came up to the top, the car was so slow that it was simply impossible.
Again it was a situation where he just wanted you to do something that was totally against common sense, but you have the trust and you just do it. I tried, but in this situation it just didn’t work and he was already in the back seat. The journey took, of course, much longer than it would have taken with a faster car. But there was nothing I could do about it and when we came to Munich, Karmapa went into the fast car with Ole. But he was laughing about it too. He would do these things all the time. He watched our reaction and then laughed. It was like a teaching and purification at the same time.
Another time Karmapa took Ole and me up to his room in Rumtek, as he wanted to give us some gifts. He gave me some folded clothes and I was so happy! He asked me to put them on, so I did. It was an old-fashioned Tibetan chuba for women. Today they have a version which is quite easy to put on. It is one piece and you turn it around and it fits everybody. But this was an older version and it was quite tricky to dress up in. You are meant to wear a chuba down to your ankles. It is a sign of class, but of course I was much taller than the average Tibetan woman. So you can imagine how funny it looked. It was impossible to wear it that short. But Karmapa made me wear it and I had to walk around in it, and he just couldn’t stop laughing. He was laughing his head off, because in Tibetan eyes I looked funny anyway. Being so tall, they didn’t know if I was a boy or a girl, and then with this chuba only down to here. But it was a gift from him, so I had to wear it. And he thought it was simply hilarious.
Karmapa’s sense of humor was amazing. When I had to translate for him, he would sometimes crack jokes, which of course you should not really translate. He loved bringing me in that kind of situation in front of other people.
We were with him for twelve years and of course you can say that he died very young. As his student, you feel the loss. But at the same time, it is not a coincidence when a Karmapa dies. He knows when to die and everything fits. It is not an ordinary way of dying.
What we do regret was that we could not communicate with him more. In the beginning, we didn’t really know the language, but later, there were many situations where he would teach us. His way of teaching us was about giving us the essence, not so much the details. This is generally the function of a Karmapa. We will see how it will be with Thaye Dorje, but generally the Karmapas work like that: not so many long teachings and explanations, but more empowerments and direct instructions.
At several occasions Karmapa called us over to him and gave us direct mind teachings, the essence of everything. For explanations about the details of the meditation, for example the 8th Karmapa, he would send us to other lamas. Sometimes he would send other lamas to us and asked them to teach us something. He would then check with them how it had gone and how our practice was going and then checked with us. For example, in order to learn the Phowa, he sent us to Ayang Rinpoche and said that this would now be a good thing to learn.
Nearly everything Karmapa said, every instruction he gave was really meaningful. Even if in that moment you didn’t understand it, you would suddenly remember it later, something he had said, which would make you understand a situation. Nothing was ever coincidental and no words or time were wasted. Everything had meaning on some level and was a teaching of some kind. We were lucky that he was here in Europe. I think that the growth in the West has happened through him. We just followed entirely what he had asked us to do. He was very clear about what we should do in the West, how we should practice, what our activities should be, down to the smallest details.
One time in England he told us that he was going to Samye Ling in Scotland and it would be good if we would go over to Ireland. At that meeting he gave us a banknote and said, “If you really keep your motivation completely pure and have no self-interest, you will never lack anything.” As a symbol for that he gave us the note. It really is like that. When you have the right motivation and keep your bonds, you can’t go wrong. Whatever happens will have meaning and will be right. That is the main quality of everything, and Karmapa illustrated that so strongly.
Again and again he would emphasize the importance of not mixing activity with politics. That was one of the things he told us so often and we didn’t know what he was talking about at that time because we didn’t know what he meant with politics. Later we found out what he meant and we remembered his words. Politics means to not keep your motivation just for the dharma and what you do in the dharma just for the benefit of others. If you have your own interest and start to manipulate things, instead of thinking of the benefit for everybody, then things become political. When the Karmapa controversy started, these were the words that guided Ole and me. We remembered what he had told us, saw what others were doing, and it became clear what he had warned us about.
In 1980, Karmapa came to the West for the last time. He had a stopover in London on his way to America. He didn’t go to any other places there and we went on to America to see him. It was the last time we saw him. Ole has talked about how we met him in Woodstock and received the last Crown Ceremony, the last time we were with him was in Boulder. Looking back now, we can see what was going on then, but at that time we didn’t understand that it was the last time we would see him. Karmapa of course knew exactly and there were already some signs.
When we said goodbye to him, I started crying. I didn’t know why, there was no obvious reason. It just felt different. There were so many signs, but you don’t really want to know it.
It was in Boulder where Karmapa gave us instructions on what we should do in the future. After we had said goodbye to him and we had already left, he called us back and told us a few more things. All this happened in a different unusual way. Since this was the last time we saw him in that incarnation, his words stayed with us very strongly. He also told us to come to Rumtek at a certain time. Karmapa knew already then that he would die. Later, I dreamed that the dakinis called me and told me that Karmapa had died. Unfortunately, it was true.
We went to Rumtek and were there when he died. The news came during a Red Crown Ceremony with Gyaltsab Rinpoche. We knew immediately what had happened. Many of you experienced that with Lopon Tsechu Rinpoche because you developed a strong bond with him.
When your teacher dies, it is a mixture of feelings. On a normal human level, of course, one is sad and misses them. That is understandable because one will not see him in that form anymore. One is attached to that form and misses them. At the same time there is also a unique opportunity to be very close to your teacher when you meditate at that time. The teacher rests in meditation and one can receive very strong blessings from him. We experienced that in Rumtek. In the middle of all this sadness was this enormous blessing where one could feel Karmapa’s presence, which was beyond everything we had experienced before.
An experience like that confirms our true nature, which is there, no matter whether we have a physical body or not. These qualities continue. It will always stay with you and give you strength. It shows that what you do is right and it gives you strength for the activity. What Ole does is Karmapa’s activity. It is what Karmapa empowered him to do, and that is what is happening.
I remember from the first moment we met until he died, Karmapa’s most striking feature were his eyes. When you looked into his eyes, you were somewhere else, light years away, in another dimension, both here and at the same time everywhere. He would often look at Ole with these eyes. Now that we are more aware of what you can know when you are on the level of a Karmapa, we are sure that he could, already in the beginning when we came to him as hippies, see everything that is going on today. This is why he empowered Ole.
We also had several meetings with him where he would just look, not say anything, and just rested in space. I don’t know how much time passed and then he blessed us without saying anything. This blessing pervades all our activity. It is our root, our source.
During all the years, from when Karmapa died and until the 17th Karmapa came, the activity only grew because he was present all the time and his directions were so clear. In that way it didn’t change anything, that he wasn’t physically present. Whenever anything came up, the answers were always there, as if he was there. When one keeps the connection through the Guru Yoga, there is always a guideline. One can be sure that things are right and it confirms everything. You know that. You are the confirmation of that.
The controversy was not a bad thing, I think. For us, it worked like a filter and made it possible for things to continue as the 16th Karmapa wanted them. He did not want all these political games, which suddenly became so dominant. It is not what he wished for and definitely not what he wanted us to transfer into our countries. It is something from Tibet we really didn’t need.
Karmapa always taught the essence, not so many detailed traditional things. That is what he wanted to transmit and what he wanted us to use and realize. And really that is what it’s all about. He transmitted the methods already. The activity of the 17th Karmapa is exactly as the 16th Karmapa wanted, and he is exactly as he said he would be. He said, “I will not be like this the next time. I will be more gentle. I will study more because that’s what the world will need at that time.”
And that’s how he is now. He’s not the huge powerhouse that the 16th Karmapa was. The power is always there of course, but the activity is a little bit different. The Karmapas and the bodhisattvas always express the activity that has the most benefit for all beings. That is what we are experiencing now with the 17th Karmapa. He is not a child anymore. He is really becoming very strong.
