TO BUDDHA AND BEYOND Part 2

At Pixar, we used to say that if you want to break the rules of storytelling, you first have to master those rules. We sent every new artist who joined the company to workshops to ensure they understood them.

For as much as I wanted to sidestep the aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that I could not relate to—the habit of prostration, the enthroning of teachers as gurus, the impenetrable logic for deconstructing reality—it turned out that I wasn’t going to avoid any of it.

I can credit that to the person who would become my Buddhist teacher, Segyu Choepel Rinpoche (whom I will refer to as Rinpoche). He applied that Pixar principle relentlessly. He was all for remaking the tradition—and shared my passion for doing so—but not until I understood the tradition in its original form. For years, he would be like a woodpecker on my head: “You have to understand the tradition before we can change it; otherwise, the result will be pleasant, but impotent.”

To a Silicon Valley guy for whom four years is a long time, this felt like being dragged through an ancient past against my will. I wanted to move—and move quickly. But that was not to be.

I

Rinpoche is an unusual—and rare—Tibetan Buddhist master. Unusual because he isn't Tibetan. He was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before moving to the U.S. in his twenties. Rare because he holds one of the highest recognitions in Tibetan Buddhism: he is a lineage holder, recognized as a "Rinpoche,” which, in Tibetan tradition, means a reincarnate master. It is almost unheard of for a non-Tibetan to receive this recognition.

In Tibetan Buddhism, lineage is the fuel that empowers the tradition. By tracing practice back through a long line of masters, current practitioners invoke the collective potency of that lineage to empower their own efforts. A lineage holder is the present-day, living embodiment of that potency. It took me years to understand what it takes to be a lineage holder—how someone becomes a vessel for the tradition's energy to pour through them. Everything I know about it comes from Rinpoche.

I met Rinpoche through an unlikely chain of events that began with a class on the Bhagavad Gita, one of India's great spiritual classics. The Bhagavad Gita is an exquisite story about a prince about to lead his troops into battle. Just before the carnage begins, he stops in despair, turns to his charioteer—who happens to be the god Krishna—and pleads for an explanation of why such suffering must occur. The dialogue that follows is a monument to how to act with clarity, integrity, and courage amid life's turmoil.

The teacher of that class was Georg Feuerstein, a renowned Hindu and Yoga scholar. To this day, I still think his synthesis of the Gita is the clearest and most insightful I've heard.

I was so moved by the class that I reached out to Feuerstein, and we became firm friends. Understanding my interest in Tibetan Buddhism, he mentioned that he had been studying with a Brazilian-born Tibetan Buddhist master named Segyu Choepel Rinpoche and offered to introduce us. My wife, Hillary, was also intrigued. We decided to take Feuerstein up on his offer.

Hillary and I met Rinpoche at his temple in Sebastopol, California. He was warm and welcoming. I was a little apprehensive because, although he was Western, everything around him still carried the ornate, ceremonial Tibetan style that I resisted. Hillary loved the energy there and was especially drawn to the healing practices that Rinpoche was known for. At a minimum, she wanted to study healing with him. Her intuition told her we should draw closer to him. To her credit, I followed.

That began the twenty-five-year journey we are still on.

II

Rinpoche's life centers on spiritual practice, not the other way around. He takes his role as a lineage holder with exceptional commitment, performing daily, weekly, and annual rituals to sustain the tradition's vitality. When visitors come to his temple, whether Buddhist or not, Tibetan or Western, they can invariably feel that energy. They sense something different there.

In my early years under Rinpoche's guidance, all the rituals were decidedly Tibetan in nature. They included everything I had resisted when I first went to Tibetan Buddhist centers. Rinpoche saw the same cultural and dogmatic issues I did, but he was practicing according to the tradition. We had many wonderful talks about the need to change to benefit today's culture and world.

I remember one conversation when he gestured toward the stars: "See that star over there? We are on a spaceship pointing towards it. Once we get there, others will be able to follow."

Here's what he meant.

Rinpoche understands life as having two trajectories. The first he calls the biological or evolutionary trajectory. That is our passage through life as we ordinarily know it, from birth through all of life's stages and experiences until we finally pass on. The second is what he calls the spiritual trajectory. That is a more subtle journey that concerns our quality of mind—how we feel, relate to, and understand ourselves and the world around us. To Rinpoche, Buddhism's purpose is to take us on that second journey. Buddhism is the spaceship. The star is the destination. The goal is to establish a route for contemporary practitioners to follow.

My problem was that Rinpoche didn't seem to be in any hurry to find that route. In fact, our early years together seemed to go in the opposite direction. Hillary and I would join for many of his weekly and annual rituals that were Tibetan in nature, style, and sometimes even language. I would sit there bristling with frustration. It felt like I was right back where I began!

I wish I could say that the process was easy for me. It wasn't. It took years. I just didn’t have the patience for the cultural differences. I don’t think I ever would have made it were it not for Hillary's quiet and steadfast commitment and belief in what we were doing.

Hillary had unwavering conviction in the need to follow Rinpoche so we could learn the tradition from him, and the trust that he would teach it to us. She never doubted my impetus to update the tradition; she merely insisted that I not get ahead of myself lest we miss something essential. She picked me up often, empathizing with my frustration while remaining steadfast in her conviction that this was the right process.

Eventually, my resistance yielded. I reached a point where I no longer cared about how the practices were conducted—I could see past the form to the essence. Once that happened, Rinpoche happily made changes. He let me rewrite our practices in clear English. He removed much of the ancient Tibetan paraphernalia from the temple and let Hillary lead a process to design a gorgeous, modern, bamboo altar that we still use. These and many other changes began to shape the foundation of a modern tradition. The same lineage, expressed in a new language and aesthetic.

III

But individual changes weren't enough. We needed a comprehensive vision.

During this time, we also held formal meetings to discuss what it would take in the long run to plant this lineage in new soil. That involved Rinpoche, Hillary, and me, along with our colleagues and dear friends Pam Moriarty and Christina Juskiewicz. Our collaboration is now approaching over twenty-five years. It has been a labor of love, a life calling, for each of us. At this point, we are as much family as we are colleagues, friends, students, and practitioners.

Much like Pixar, we crafted a succinct plan to chart the way forward. It boiled down to four initiatives, and one very big caveat.

The first initiative was to transform the language and the aesthetic of the tradition. We needed to lift it out of its Tibetan shell and plant it in a new one.

The second was to transcend what we had come to call the "king model." This was the anointment of teachers as gurus with unquestioned authority. We believed in the importance of teachers, but not the need to give them god-like status.

The third was to integrate Buddhist thought with contemporary knowledge. Buddhist theories are not the last word on knowledge, and we all strongly agreed that they needed to be put to the test of modern ideas and updated where necessary.

Finally, we wanted to open Buddhist thought and practice to a new type of practitioner. We called them "green arrows." This was our reference to bright, curious, open-minded thinkers who would enjoy engaging in a process of inner growth and exploring questions about the nature of mind and reality.

The one big caveat—the precondition to any of this—was to maintain the energy and potency of the tradition. Rinpoche understood that moving away from the tradition's cultural roots risked dilution. This was not a chance he was willing to take, so as we rewrote and redesigned, he kept his hand firmly on the throttle of authenticity, insisting that every step maintained the depth and potency for which the tradition was known.

As the full scope of these ideas began to crystallize, I felt overwhelmed. I had indeed been pushing to take the tradition in the direction we had outlined. Still, as I so often say, naiveté is the hallmark of innovation, because if most innovators understood what they were getting into, few might actually try. I was caught on my own petard. The first initiative alone—rewriting the tradition in clear, modern, accessible language—was daunting enough. The tradition had a two-thousand-year history of philosophical and practical texts! And there were three other initiatives! This was a very tall order, especially for a small group of us.

One day, with the five of us present, I expressed my exasperation:

"This is going to take five hundred years," I said to the others.

This wasn’t an idle throwaway or joke. I meant it. I couldn’t see how what we were trying to do was possible.

Then Rinpoche, with a smile on his face and with steadfast seriousness, replied, "No, it won’t take five hundred years. Just a hundred.”

So here I am, almost twenty-five years later, one-fourth of the way through a hundred-year project. We have made a lot of headway, I would say. Only seventy-five years to go.

IV

After all these years, I feel different than when I started. I am not a master, a teacher, or a realized person. But I do feel that I have quietly absorbed the ideas of this tradition into my life and way of being, and I feel happy about that.

If I had to summarize what I learned, it would be that having a spiritual life is not something that we do. It is something that we are. It is a disposition towards life, a way of being. That way of being has nothing to do with how much we pray, meditate, or read philosophy. It concerns who we are.

I have encountered many individuals who are excellent at spiritual “technique—meditation, textual knowledge, practice, and so on—but don't embrace a spiritual way of being. By the same token, I have known individuals who do little spiritual practice, but are decidedly spiritual in their way of being.

If I had to use words to describe that way of being, I would choose something like an engaged yielding. That may not sound like much, but in practice, it is life-changing.

I say engaged, because I do not think spiritual life entails passivity or disengagement. Quite the opposite, in fact. If anything, it is about an intensified engagement with what it means to be alive, conscious, and aware.

I say yielding because, if there is a singular quality to spiritual life, it is yielding to forces greater than ourselves, forces in and around us, and, notably, forces that flow through us. Aligning with those forces with ease rather than fighting them brings about a real transformation in experience. We will return to all of these ideas.

I also think that spiritual life is not all or nothing; that exceedingly few individuals can embody the spirit of engaged yielding all the time, and that embodying it any of the time is something very worthy.

I see Buddhism as a system to wake us up to that way of being, but we have to know how to use it. To that end, its philosophy of the Middle Way has much to offer. It reminds us to commit to spiritual teachings without turning them into gospel truth or dogma; to understand something about the philosophy of mind without over-intellectualizing it; and to cultivate a disciplined mind, without beating ourselves up with self-judgment or self-criticism.

Finally, the Middle Way reminds us that all the teachers, philosophies, and practices are merely guideposts, not endpoints. We must learn to use them while keeping our eyes on where they point. They are levers to shape experience; they are not experience itself. In short, to learn what Buddhism points to, we do indeed need to understand what it means to go to Buddha and beyond.

I’d love to hear what you think. Please email me anytime with your questions and reflections. If something you share might benefit other readers, I’ll ask you if I can include it in future pieces.