Just This Side Of Tibet

Since 1988, I have been involved in promoting inter-religious dialogue and understanding in Italy, working closely with the Benedictines and the PIME missionary society, and making irregular reports to the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue. This work has put me in touch with many of the Buddhist centers in Italy and in other parts of Europe. 

I taught a semester on Buddhist soteriology at the major seminary in Florence and offered a seminar at the major seminary in Mantova; I also directed our own diocesan Institute of Religious Studies, which certifies teachers of religion in the public school system of Italy.
In 1992, I toured India and Nepal as a "specialist", assisting a group of Indian and European Benedictines in their meetings with various Buddhist groups.

In 1995, I was invited by the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue to be part of a delegation to the monastery of Fo Kuang Shan in Taiwan and to present, before representatives of most of the major Buddhist traditions and a large number of Catholic missionaries, scholars, bishops and theologians, a major paper on tantric Buddhism, the one school that was unable to send a representative at that time.  Working mainly with Prof. Donald Mitchell and members of the staff of the PCID, I helped write the final statement of the colloquium, which stands as a milestone in relations between the Catholic Church and the Buddhist traditions.

Every year, I continue to work on a portion of the Tibetan and Sanskrit materials that I had collected in the course of my doctoral research. There is now a number of publications relating to the biographical tradition of Milarepa to my credit, and on this basis I applied to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Religion for grants to support a fieldwork approach to the material already collected.
I also hoped to widen the scope of my research to include the living tradition of spiritual practice and devotion in relation to Milarepa, the Tibetan yogi and poet of the twelfth century.  Since most of Himalayan Buddhism is in an imperiled condition, the project had considerable timeliness. Therefore, my main purpose in going to Asia for the fifth time in twelve years was to collect texts and to record the singing of those who carry on the traditions of Milarepa. In this, I succeeded to a great extent, thanks to the good training I received over the past thirty years.  Beyond the specific hopes and designs of the expedition, however, there was always the dimension of pilgrimage.  In addition, the research itself opened up a rare opportunity for me to meet and study with some of the leading Tibetan masters of the Kagyu and Nyingma orders.  I was thus advancing scholarly knowledge and simultaneously opening up a potentially fertile form of dialogue  with the leaders of the Tibetan Buddhist communities in exile. 

 At the present time there are not more than four or five Catholic priests who have even an elementary command of classical Tibetan. 
In addition, among the great lamas there is a great deal of confusion about the nature of Christianity. The profound differences between the two religions and the extreme difficulty that the Tibetans have simply in preserving and transmitting their own imperiled traditions have impeded the progress of mutual understanding, with some noteworthy exceptions (such as the volume, The Good Heart, in which H. H. the Dalai Lama comments with remarkable insight on several passages of the Gospels).  

My visit to the lamas was certainly unique in that I was coming with some command of the spoken and written languages and an extensive knowledge of the materials available in translation.  Moreover, I have a large collection of Tibetan texts which I have been studying for over 14 years and I had many specific questions that only the lamas are in a position to answer. It is a tribute to the open-mindedness that is typical of nearly all of these great masters that they accorded me extraordinary cordiality and often plunged themselves with great enthusiasm into my tiny project, taking
time from other far more urgent concerns.

 It is not easy, physically or psychologically, to travel in South Asia.  At the age of 47, one begins to notice.  It is precisely that noticing that interests me in these journal entries:  the ultimate guru and holy place is the Self and the ultimate journey is to look ever more steadily at that relentless witness to everything that seems to be going on in an unending dynamic replay of the nine dramatic moods; the pleasure comes from watching one unfold and give rise to the next, splayed across the field of perception.

That inner gazing ceases to be merely "interior" and opens out in surprising ways that cannot be forced or programmed or formalized.  Looking inwardly we may come to anticipate the flow of ongoing change in and around us, and we may find out how to communicate our discoveries in ways that stand to words as highways to signposts. 

I nonetheless hope that these words, even as signposts, awaken that which is already present inside you, but which delights in play and discovery in what we like to call space and time.  As we journey together in Nepal and India, as we ascend six high passes to "make it" to Dolpo, more and more you may discover that it is Dolpo that is making pilgrimage to you. And the singers of Milarepa's songs in Dolpo, in Kham and in Kathmandu,like whales in imperiled migration, are urging you to learn the songs faster than ever before, such that the humanity yet to come will not find itself poorer for not having celebrated the true nature of those things seen and heard and felt only in the body of yogis, in the body of sufferers, in body of pilgrims, in the body beyond such names and free of such forms.