Workable Practice: Revisiting an Enlightened Community

The schedule at Karme-Choling was tight, and mostly the same each day. Discipline and precision were the watchwords. And lots of practice.

By Greg Guma

original version published in the Vermont Vanguard Press, 1979 

“Buddhism doesn’t teach religion, it teaches spirituality, or rather, a way of life. It doesn’t promise anything. It teaches us to be what we are, to become what we are, constantly, and to relate to our living situations in that way.”

— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

Vermont isn’t exactly the Himalayas, but there is something ancient and sacred about the Green Mountains, even with Interstate ribbons of highway cutting through the view. And that’s not the only similarity between Tibet and northeastern Vermont, I thought, as we drove toward Karme-Choling, the Buddhist meditation center started eight years before to help bring Buddha’s example to America. 

Both places were also home for Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (an honorific meaning “precious one”), founder of this and other contemplative communities.

The photographer making the trip with me had never been to a Buddhist community before. He expected “monk-types” in saffron robes, chanting in Hare Krishna style, he admitted. Since I’d been visiting to study and meditate for years — from the start, when it was known as Tale of the Tiger — I knew his expectations would be shattered once we were on the 540-acre farm outside the Village of Barnet.

There were no blissed-out Hindu disciples, no Silva Mind Control or Moonies (although some had done a bit of “spiritual shopping” in the past). These American Buddhists basically looked and acted like the rest of us. They drank coffee, smoked between meditation sessions, and enjoyed a good joke.

Still, there was a profound difference between life at this contemplative center and the usual samsara (confusion) surrounding us every day. The people here actively tried to follow the Buddha’s example, teachings, and vision of community. They also sat in silent meditation at least four hours a day. It was called “practice,” and these Buddhists considered it the core of their lives of “basic sanity.” They were on the path of enlightenment — a state of complete awakeness. 

I hadn’t been back for several years, spurred on by talking with Buddhists who had launched Burlington Darmadhadu, a teaching, meditation and study house nearby. About six adults and their kids had been sharing a home on Margaret Street, offering classes and, on weekends, opening their first-floor shrine room for public “practice.” According to Cindy, a member of the small community, the plan was to become more public and move into a larger building downtown. 

        “We’re hanging out our shingle,” she said.

During an evening at their home, I’d watched a tea ceremony, full of compelling simplicity and precision, yet at the same time ordinary. Now I was revisiting their larger community, attempting again to understand how surrender to the ordinary — to the boredom of silent practice — can lead to the end of suffering.

The farm was in full bloom; a thriving garden faced white buildings across a dirt path. Most of the structures didn’t exist the last time I was here. The community’s focus then was farming and possible expansion. But that phase was over. Karme-Choling had turned back to its main purpose: intensive training for visitors from New York, Boston, and Burlington, following the Buddha’s example of passionlessness and non-aggression.

Guatama Buddha was not a god, but rather a prince five centuries before Christ’s birth, and expected to become a ruler of the Sakya tribe. At age 29, married with a newborn child, he renounced his worldly life and became a homeless religious seeker. Despite his comfortable place in the world, he wasn’t at peace; his mind turned often to the inevitability of suffering beneath the bright surface of the world, to impermanence and the universal facts of sickness, old age and death.

During six years of wandering Buddha found neither enlightenment nor peace, and finally abandoned his ascetic quest while continuing his spiritual practice. One day, while meditating under a Bodhi tree, he finally experienced the illumination he sought, and spent his remaining years as a teacher, sharing his path of salvation and peace. The same way of non-attachment that Rinpoche brought to the US and, specifically, to Vermont. It had worked for me.

The Dharma

 “No one can embark upon the path without the preparation of the Hinayana, without developing the evolutionary tendencies, the readiness for the path. In this sense the teachings could be said to be secret, for if a person is not ready for the teachings he won’t be able to hear them.”

— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

At the time Chogyam Trungpa was the most charismatic Buddhist leader in the West, said to be a tulku or emanation of compassion, the 11th reincarnation of a high lama. As the story went, his education was guided by Tibetan monks from early childhood, and he eventually became Abbot of the Surmang Monasteries. But Communist pressure eventually forced him to flee, first to India, then to England, and later to the US. 

In March 1970, several of his students started Tale of the Tiger in Barnet. It was the beginning of a new international Buddhist movement.  Despite personal flaws revealed later — among them, heavy drinking, smoking and promiscuity — Trungpa was a major force in bringing Buddhism to the US. 

For several years I had visited frequently for meditation and training, studying with Rinpoche, sharing free time with William Burroughs, and long afterward continuing what was called insight meditation. “All the teacher can do is to create the situation,” Trungpa once explained. “And because of the situation and environment the pupil’s mind will also be in the right state, because he is already there.” 

Beyond all the theory, meditating was crucial, a rewarding practice that expanded my horizons in many subtle ways. Thoughts still arose and demanded attention, but when meditation worked I could observe them, without rejecting or becoming involved. The idea was to accept rather than discriminate or become engaged in mental struggle. Just be here now.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition focuses on three approaches, or vehicles: the Hinayana, or narrow path of fundamental truths and basic practice; Mahayana, the open path of compassion for others; and Vajrayana, the ultimate enlightened power over the phenomenal world. All three paths were explored at Karme-Choling and other meditation centers, but most of life revolved around Hinayana practice.

“In the past we had a communal flavor,” said Gaylan, who had become director in 1977 after studies at Buddhist centers in Boulder and Aspen, Colorado, and teaching at the Naropa Institute. “We’re moving from being a community to an institution. People come here for the intensive programs, and the whole environment is filled with Buddhist teachings,” he explained. In 1979 visitors could stay at Karme-Choling for just $12 a day, participating in programs ranging from weekend retreats to month-long Dathuns. In 2024, a one-week meditation retreat was priced at about $1,000. Smoking is no longer permitted anywhere on the property.

This center and others were part of an umbrella organization, Vajradhatu, an incorporated association of Buddhist churches under Rinpoche. And thus, it was at his instruction that the focus at Karme-Choling shifted on completion of an initial $600,000 construction project that included dorm space for 100 visitors and an exquisite meditation hall.

The move from community to institution altered both life at the center and relations with the nearby village. Gardening, once a major summer project, was cut back to change the balance between work and practice. Production of meditation cushions and other accessories was scaled back.

”Local people are no longer joking about us,” Gaylen said. He pointed out a favorite article in Country Journal, which covered rural New England life. “They feel we’re stable and responsible, and a few local people come to the programs.”

He echoed Rinpoche, who had already produced a dozen books, advising not to submit to “blind faith,” but rather “to trust in a good doctor. Having a teacher is part of the path, showing us competence in dealing with the world.”

As Rinpoche himself explained it, ”All the teacher can do is to create the situation. He will create the right situation and because of the situation and environment the pupil’s mind will also be in the right state, because he is already there.”

The Sangha

It was 1:30, lunchtime at the center. Staff and residents gathered in the airy cafetera for salad, rice and tea. Some people weren’t speaking. They were on Dathun, 30 days of full time meditation. These short-term residents practiced four hours daily, from 7 to 8 a.m., from 9 to 11, and from 6 to 7 p.m. The rest of the day was split between work, in which other visitors took part, and evening study groups.

The sangha, or community of Buddhists, had become smaller and more focussed since I last attended Mahayana training in 1975. I talked with Stephanie about the changes. She had lived through most of them.

“There is less farming,” she said, “but it is done well. Originally, most people came to live here to do practice,  but realized it must be a center for others. The big change came with all the building. We became work-oriented.”

We fondly recalled days of bringing in corn and potatoes for freezing, assembly lines of residents and visitors. “But now practice is more important again,” she said. “We realize we’re not creating our own little world. People who stay here are in training, to work here or in other centers.”

Not everything had become institutionalized. Tasks were still shared, especially child care, dishes, and clean up. There was also some gardening and production of samadhi cushions. Like most long-term residents, Stephanie also took a turn at meditation instruction and “creating an environment” for practice.

”Have you been in the meditation hall yet?” She asked. Since I hadn’t, she suggested I do some sitting in the afternoon. Forty-five people in the seventh day of their dathun would be back in the hall at 4 p.m., after their work time. If I wanted to write about meditation, joining the sangha felt like the right idea.

“Meditation is very much a matter of exercise. It is a working practice. It is not a question of going into some inward depth, but of widening and expanding outwards.”

— Rinpoche

Practice and the Four Noble Truths

The meditation hall was decorated in red, orange and blue, with white walls and beams adorned with gilded castings. At the front was an altar, flanked by huge windows looking out on the farm and hill beyond. Rinpoche’s mahogany chair was on one side, facing wall-size photos of His Holiness and a sculpture of Buddha on the opposite wall.

At 4 p.m. someone blew a conch outside and another resident repeatedly struck the living room gong. People walked silently toward the building, removing their shoes before entering. I joined them and sat cross-legged on two cushions facing the altar.

My eyes were open but looking at nothing in particular. I concentrated on my breathing. At first, at such times, some effort was needed to bind the mind to this most simple process. Thoughts arose, and I tried to observe them without becoming involved or rejecting them. The idea was to accept everything rather than to discriminate or engage in mental struggle. It still wasn’t easy.

There was much to distract, not only in the hall but in my mind. The Four Noble Truths, for example. Buddha’s basic teachings. First, that pain is part of all experiences in life — the pain of birth, illness and death, but also the dissatisfaction that haunts us. Second, that the origin of pain is desire, craving, or attachment to our actions. Third, that the goal is to do away with attachments, expectations, desires. And fourth, that the way to that goal is an eightfold path of ethical action and meditation.

My thoughts moved from the teachings to myself: Am I clearing my mind? I’ve almost got it. How can I write about so vast a subject? Why are all these people here? Oh, I’m daydreaming again. Back to my breathing.

This is boring. But Buddhists often joke about that, about how ordinary it is to just sit here. Being on the path is the goal itself. How did Rinpoche put it?

”We will see that one can in fact be at the end result at the same time that one is traveling along the path. This can only happen when there is no I to start with, when there is no expectation.”

The time did pass, broken only by 10 minutes of quiet walking to stretch our legs. After 90 minutes the meditation leader rang a large gong. We rose, not excited, just finished for the moment. It was time for tea, cantaloup and watermelon, and a half-hour break until the sangha returned to the hall for evening practice.

The schedule was tight, and mostly the same each day. Discipline and precision were the watchwords. And lots of practice.

I recalled an epigram used during a training session to describe the Buddhist view. It incorporated irony, clarity and a humanistic, atheistic perspective that marked Trungpa’s approach.

”We must accept that it is all hopeless,” he said. “But it is also workable.”

False Prophets of the Electronic Age

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, 

voters turn to electronic hucksters and demagogues who offer simplistic answers and the false hope of a moral revival. 

By Greg Guma

Glenn Beck and Fox News called the August 30, 2010 rally they staged in Washington, DC “non-political.” But that didn’t stop conservative politicians from saying the opposite, describing it as a reaction to Obama administration policies. And the rhetoric appealed mainly to those who already thought the US had been hijacked by godless socialists. 

The result was bizarre, although tame compared to the average Trump rally, and capitalized on the fact that it was held the same day, and in the same location, as Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I have a dream” speech. Yet it flipped King’s vision on its head. A early example of political trolling.

None of this was really a surprise. Opportunists Beck and Sarah Palin — who had attracted a cult-like following of anti-government Tea Party activities and nativist “Mama Grizzlies” with her fact-challenged approach to politics — had seized the chance to distort public debate and promote themselves as electronic prophets. After all, they had a powerful pulpit on Fox News, whose parent company had just exposed its political preference with a $1 million contribution to the Republican Party. It was just the beginning.

Christian right evangelists had been doing this for generations. Starting with radio in the 1930s, they used each new technology to influence opinion, win elections, and hammer home their theology. One of the first was Aimee Semple McPherson, who pioneered the approach on a powerful Los Angeles radio station. Broadcasting from her temple, McPherson styled herself a modern-day Joan of Arc in a titanic struggle against communism.

McPherson’s crusade reached the boiling point in 1934 during the insurgent Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair. The socialist author of The Jungle and other novels about the excesses of capitalism had pledged to “end poverty in California.” But the evangelist, in an alliance with Republican leaders, Hollywood propagandists and political consultants, recast the race in apocalyptic terms.

“Someone has cast in the poison herb,” McPherson bellowed on the Sunday before Election Day, “and if we eat thereof we shall all perish and the glory of our nation as it has stood through the years shall perish with us.” Sinclair, at first the front runner in an era of mass unemployment and hard times, became the target of the nation’s first disinformation-fueled “media campaign” and ultimately lost by 200,000 votes. McPherson effectively seized on growing fears of revolution, convincing her flock – many of them poor – that the real enemy was satanic communism and its Democratic messenger.  It sounds too familiar.

First appearing on CBS stations in 1930, Father Charles Coughlin built a similarly ardent following with his volatile mixture of populism, nationalism and anti-semitism. When CBS management insisted that he stop railing against “international bankers,” the evangelist appealed directly to his radio flock, who sent more than a million protest letters to the network. CBS responded by replacing all paid religious broadcasts with Church of the Air, a show that offered free, rotating air time to speakers from the three “major” faiths. This became a standard media approach with religious groups, a time slot for those with enough followers and clout.

Coughlin responded by creating his own network and becoming even more political, and ultimately fascist. Along the way, until losing much of his base in World War II, he suggested that “Christians suffer more at the hands of the Reds than Jews do in the Third Reich” and that Nazi Germany had to protect itself from Jewish communists who were influencing radio, journalism and finance. Attempts to censor him were often decried as “Jewish terrorism.”

Like Donald Trump, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Christian fundamentalist movement had an intense love/hate relationship with mass media. After all, the movement flourished on TV with Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour.” By 1980, a tabloid newspaper turned Falwell’s radio and TV pronouncements into syndicated columns. The paper’s reporters gloated about its growing influence. At the same time, however, they despised the “immoral” television networks. It took a while to get one of their own.

For these pioneers of electronic fundamentalism, the real “insiders” were purveyors of “smut” and degenerate lifestyles, a vast group that included most “non-Christian” media and members of the press. Their basic message, which read like a newsy catechism, was that the “moral” can clean up the media by exerting control over it. That meant boycotting specific outlets, while supporting and exclusively consuming Christian media.

Through insistent propaganda, the Moral Majority turned ignorance into strength and sexism into a virtue. This sounds all too contemporary in the post-truth era of bully boy politics.

Still, the electronic fundamentalism of Falwell’s empire was almost moderate in contrast with the outright Aryan arrogance of Christian Vanguard. “Specifically compiled for the Elect,” this religious house organ was obsessed with one big enemy, the Jews. It was a more bullish racism, punctuated with articles like “Sadistic Jewish Slaughter of Animals.”

Pretending to intellectual rigor, one article attempted to prove that the enemy was plagued by a “devastating sense of inferiority.” In another report, covering an Aryan Nations Movement conference, the publisher of a sister publication, Zion’s Watchman, came out strong against humanism, marxism and “the seed of the serpent.”

Yet the Aryans remained hopeful, according to another contributor, because “the various right wing movements will come together, and unite as never before once we understand the importance of rallying under the Law of God, making what we call Germany’s WWII ‘Nazism’ seem tiny in comparison.” It was scary stuff, yet crept into public discourse.

Like many movement house organs of the pre-Internet 1980s, Christian Vanguard had a mail order clearinghouse for books, with listings under headings like “secret societies,” “the money question,” and “the Jewish world conspiracy.” Another heading covered “self defense and survival,” and included books on explosives, combat and surveillance. This was an early warning of the armed and dangerous nativism and survivalism to come. 

Clearly, the “Elect” were prepping for a future war. Reading their paper also offered solid proof that Nazism was alive in Louisiana and other places in the ’80s. In 2017 it ultimately re-emerged publicly and violently in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Not much has changed since the radio years except the targets. Speaking on his own TV network, Pat Robertson made the goal absolutely clear years ago:  “to mobilize Christians, one precinct at a time, one community at a time, one state at a time, until once again we are the head and not the tail, and at the top rather than at the bottom of our political system.” In a country founded on the principle of church-state separation, this sounded unlikely — for a while. Yet Beck, Palin and millions of others embraced this “dream.”

To call Beck and Palin evangelists, or even propagandists, isn’t a stretch.  Promoted by Fox and backed by corporate conservatives like the Koch family, they and others normalized an extreme, religiously-infused ideology and immersed viewers in a false reality. Specious arguments were presented as history, biblical truth or scientific fact. At first these “electronic “prophets” disguised their political calls as sermons or attempts to “restore” integrity and honor. Too often “mainstream” media legitimized and mainstreamed their messages. Now the mask is off.

Working with idealogues and opportunists, the religious right created a distorted picture of contemporary reality that millions of people, insecure and hungry for guidance, came to embrace. As former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed explained before the election of George W. Bush, the short-term objective was to force candidates to endorse their religious right’s agenda, an effort that frequently proved successful. But the ultimate step was to turn the agenda into national policy, a goal that first came into view when candidates for president in 2000, most notably Bush, inserted religious right rhetoric into the presidential election.

A foundation had been laid during the previous decade. Although their candidates faltered in the 1990s, Christian Right “wedge” issues – school prayer, family values, sex, abortion, and gay “lifestyle” – skewed the debate, eclipsing the competing views of progressive Christians and others who opposed an intolerant and paranoid theology.

“Our time is coming,” Pat Buchanan told the faithful during the 1996 presidential primaries. Having lost every race on Super Tuesday, he nevertheless predicted victory for the fundamentalist forces he helped catalyze. Buchanan’s gospel of “cultural war” struck a chord with the Christian right and Howard Phillips US Taxpayers Party, which wanted to restore the “Christian republic,” end welfare, scrap the civil service and IRS, and withdraw from international organizations. 

In 2000, candidates like Steve Forbes, Allen Keyes, and Gary Bauer built on this foundation, linking jeremiads about political corruption and moral decay with calls to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Once Palin emerged during the 2008 presidential campaign Buchanan looked positively gleeful on TV as his gospel was embraced by a new generation.

In response, progressives put their faith in exposure. When more people understood the extreme views of the Christian Right, went the logic, their candidates would be rejected. But too many people, uncertain about their futures and the safety of their families and friends, were already vulnerable to the politics of paranoia and blame. 

From time to time, Beck and others would also point to a secret conspiracy supposedly bent on subjugating the nation to some form of mutated socialism or fascism.  The idea that Barack Obama was a Muslim Manchurian Candidate fit well within this theory. It echoed the sermons of McPherson and Father Coughlin. In a time of distrust and decadence, when more and more believe their institutions don’t work and leaders are usually greedy crooks, it isn’t hard to accept such a prophecy. Then came birther-ism and Donald Trump.

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, too many people have turned to electronic hucksters who offered simplistic answers and the hope of a moral revival. Although some spiritual traditions offered more constructive answers – tolerance, equality, harmony with nature, and social justice, among others – their spokesmen don’t often reach so vast an audience.

But endlessly repeating lies and distortions, while sometimes effective for a while, doesn’t make them true. Even a manipulated public must eventually face the contradiction of a movement that poses as patriotic and “pro-family” and the divisions and destruction it promotes. There is still hope that the hypocritical moralizing of opportunists — from Beck and Palin to Trump — will be exposed for what it is, a false prophecy that no amount of repetition can conceal.