A Buddhist Monk's 4-Year Quest For
Awareness
By John Merfeld, WPR, July 21,
2016
Yongey Mingyur
Rinpoche Left His Monastery And Survived Alone In A
Cave
Bodhgaya, India -- One morning
in June 2011, residents of the Tergar Monastery in Bodhgaya, India,
awoke to find that celebrated the master of Buddhist meditation,
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, had vanished.
He appeared to have packed nothing, but did leave behind a short
letter to his followers. It said that he would be traveling "with
no plans or fixed agenda, just an unswerving commitment to the path
of awakening."
No one in his community saw him again for four and half
years.
Rinpoche was already a major leader in the Buddhist world before
embarking on his wandering retreat. He was the leader of a global
meditation practice and had been formally recognized as a
reincarnated 17th century lama. His mission, then and now, is to
make meditation accessible to the modern world. After his years of
retreat, he said that he returned as a different
person.
At a young age, Rinpoche was inspired to take such a solitary
journey by his meditation teachers, including his father. But when
the time came, he had a hard time leaving his community
behind.
"If I tell them, then they will drag me, you know, 'Don’t go,
please!'" Rinpoche said, laughing. "So, I cannot tell them. So then
I just leave one day, in the middle of the night."
Although he has
been a devout Buddhist all his life, Rinpoche also comes from a
well-off family in the Himalayas. Living and begging on the streets
of India was a new and difficult experience.
"I felt very
embarrassed staying on the street," he said. "I didn’t mind that
there was no bed, I didn’t mind that there was no room. But I felt
like, 'Everybody’s looking at me,' feeling very
uncomfortable."
He overcame that embarrassment, but more difficult to conquer was
his body’s need for nourishment. Begging was his only source of
food, and an unreliable one at that. Rinpoche’s contemplative
practice helped him maintain faith that he would survive.
"I tried to meditate," Rinpoche said. "And then, after some time, I
have trust, some belief, kind of like, 'Okay, nothing happened
today, and something will happen tomorrow, and I can get
food.'"
However, after just a few weeks of life on the street, Rinpoche
became violently sick. A severe bout of food poisoning brought him
to the brink of death. He described the illness as "vomiting and
diarrhea for three days. And on the fourth day, I could not move,
and I thought, 'I’m going to die.'"
Rinpoche knew that with a single phone call, he could be taken back
to his monastery and saved, but he stayed where he was. Looking
back on the decision, he laughed deeply and said "suicide mission,"
adding that in that moment, he chose to remain open to the idea of
death.
"I just let it go," he said. "Whatever happens, happens. You can
learn until the last breath. So death is the best adventure in our
life!"
Now firmly believing he was about to die, Rinpoche entered a state
that he called "resting (his) mind in open awareness." He couldn't
see, hear or move, but his mind became utterly clear, free of what
Rinpoche calls "the monkey mind," the clamor of ordinary thoughts
and worries.
"Like blue sky without clouds, and sun shining," he said. "There’s
no time. This monkey mind is gone. At the same time, I know … but
it was knowing without thinking. And that experience was so
precious, so blissful, so joyful. And I stayed there within that
state, somehow, maybe four or five hours."
As the sun began to rise, a new feeling came over Rinpoche: it
wasn't his time to die. He regained his health and set out into the
mountains, living in caves and eating wild vegetables and
mushrooms. It was during this period that he realized how his
near-death experience had changed him.
"Staying in a cave was so nice for me," he said. "After I have this
almost-die experience, everything’s okay. I can stay
everywhere."
Before this experience, even though he'd been meditating for a long
time, Rinpoche said he still struggled to let go, which is called
grasping.
"Then after that, I’m so happy," he said. "I have so much
gratitude, so much appreciation for just being. Just seeing. Just
hearing. Just experiencing."
It's this lesson of the joys of simply being present that Rinpoche
has integrated into his teachings across the
world.
"You can meditate everywhere, anytime," he said. "You can meditate
at the office, and going to exercise, only two seconds, three
seconds, okay. You don’t need a special cushion. You don’t need
perfect posture. Just being, resting your mind and body, just being
with the present moment. Awareness is always present."
People should view meditation more in the context of their daily
lives, not as some esoteric ritual, Rinpoche said.
"One minute in the morning helps all day," he said.