Bodhgaya, in India. Several years ago, in February 1997, I had the great good fortune to meet one of the most amazing beings of our time, someone whom I unexpectedly recognized. This strange sensation of déjà vu hit me at the moment when his palms pressed against the sides of my head as I bowed instinctively and presented him with the symbolic offering of a silk scarf. This gesture and ritual are very much a part of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition each time one meets a recognized high lama (guru).
The sensation of “remembering” happened at some uncanny, experiential level. One moment I was curiously anticipating meeting a holy man, and the next this almost blissful sense of recognition came over me. I felt drawn to him as if he were someone I had known and loved for a very long time. The feeling was momentary – like a television channel flickering for an instant – before switching back to the mundane world where I was being introduced to Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche.
In this life, that was our first meeting. He was smiling in no special way; he did not pick me out for special attention. I was one in a long line of people waiting to offer a kata, the traditional silk scarf. But as Rinpoche’s disciples and followers knelt and prostrated all around me in reverence to him, I recall thinking, “What took him so long to find me?”
REMEMBERING A PAST LIFE
Since then I have embraced Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche as my spiritual guide and teacher. It was a meeting I should have anticipated, but when you really do not know anything about lamas and past lives, this is not something you could realize.
There had been many signs, but I was blind to them. Most telling had been my dreams, of which the most significant was one of two white tigers, which I later discovered were in fact snow lions. These heralded the appearance of the guru into my life, although I was unaware of this. Then there had been the continuous mental images that came to me – images of some distant time, up in the Himalayan mountain range and on the stone-cold floor of a monastery. Later I would understand them to be flashes of memory, but when they first came into my consciousness they meant nothing to me. It was only when I saw pictures and actually went to the Solu Khumbu region in the Himalayas that I recognized the place. Those revelations blew my mind, but even then I bent over backward not to “reach” out. I kept dismissing the coincidences as fancy imagination on my part – until I met Rinpoche, and felt the momentous impact of that up-close moment.
For a year after that personally historic meeting, I flew around the world chasing Buddhas – I went from India to Taiwan to the United States, and eventually to Kathmandu and the Himalayas, to the high mountains of the Solu Khumbu region and a village called Lawudo. I am now convinced that in a past life I lived there with Rinpoche – at a time when he was the Lawudo Lama, a living Buddha who manifested as a meditator-teacher living in retreat in a cave in the high mountains. Few knew him for what he really was, until the time came for his passing on.
Only at his death did the Lawudo lama reveal the enlightened mind that had resided in his enlightened body. For twelve days and nights the signs appeared – rainbow clouds, blue skies, and the sounds of angels singing. After he had been cremated, nothing of the bones of his holy body remained among the ashes, save a precious jewel. This sparkling jewel was subsequently returned to his family … and then the people of that region came to regard the Lawudo lama as an enlightened being. But there was much more to his kindness, for the stunning sequel of that magnificently divine passing was his reincarnation: the Lawudo lama came back.
He reincarnated into the body of the young Zopa Rinpoche, and from the moment he could talk he made known who he was, persistently pointing to the old Lawudo lama’s cave and insisting that was his cave. Buddhists know that “divine happenings” always occur as if they are common-day occurrences, with little excitement and no fanfare. That is how it happened with the Lawudo lama’s reappearance in the human realm – but, instead of coming back as a meditator living in a remote cave, this time he took the form of a humble monk. He easily passed all the tests that eventually led to his recognition and enthronement as the reincarnation of the Lawudo Lama. As a young tulku (reincarnate lama), Rinpoche spent some years in Tibet getting a monastic education, before being forced to flee to India when the Chinese invaded in 1959.
PAST LIVES AND NEW PERSPECTIVES
For years I had known that in a past life I lived in a cave overlooking a valley cultivated with bright-green plants (which I later discovered were potato plants), while in the distance there were high, snow-capped mountains. I knew that my significant past lives had to have been lived somewhere amid such peaks, for I have always loved mountains. For a long time I assumed that the picture in my mind was somewhere in China. It was only after I went to Lawudo that I realized that it was a vision of somewhere high up in the Himalayas.
Meeting Rinpoche made everything I had ever been and done take on a new perspective. I had retired from corporate life in the early 1990s, after reaching some exalted heights. No one believed I could make myself get off the roller-coaster life I had carved out in the rich and glamorous world of business.
I told skeptical friends I had “other mountains to climb.” I had no idea what lay ahead, but had retired to become a full-time mother. It seemed absurd, after praying so hard and taking a decade to produce a child, to turn away from the joys of mothering Jennifer in favor of chasing the corporate dream. So I cashed in my investments, made myself redundant, packed my bags, said goodbye to Hong Kong, and went home to Malaysia. I devoted the next few years exclusively to Jennifer – it was a special time for us both and one we will never forget. In those few years Jennifer blossomed, and between us was born a mother-daughter love that today transcends our hearts and minds. But we are two individuals. And while my life is entering its waning phase, hers is just beginning. As Jennifer’s life takes on new colors and flavors, it makes me realize that I cannot live my life exclusively around hers. If I truly wish her to fly, I must let go.
I turned to writing, a first love that for twenty years I had put on hold. Feng shui seemed an obvious subject for me to make uniquely my own. Something must have impelled me to become an author of feng shui books, for my very first book on the subject – amateurish and self-published though it was – struck a chord with collective minds out there hungry for knowledge of the subject. Feng Shui became instantly successful. More importantly, it came to the attention of Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche.
Like a single drop of water falling into a big pond, the ripples created by my first book had many repercussions – new-found fame and fortune, a new career, and a new way of life. Most importantly, the book became the instrument that led to a spiritual awakening that would leave me breathless, amazed, and hungry for more.
Through Feng Shui Rinpoche found me, and through Rinpoche I met the Buddhas. Through Rinpoche, I learned about past lives and reincarnations; about karma and the seeds of enlightenment; about the nature of the samsaric world and the ability to become liberated; about compassion, and the ultimate realization of wisdom that comes from understanding emptiness. Success, wealth, material gain – all the things that had meant so much to me beforehand now took on a new perspective. I saw them simply as part of this samsaric world, as temporary manifestations of past good karma, but I also knew that these material comforts and luxuries were impermanent. As with life itself, everything we have – our beautiful bodies, our wealth, and our health – is impermanent.
All of life is impermanent. All of life is in the nature of suffering. There is no permanent happiness. The only real and lasting happiness comes from the wisdom-mind that has realized compassion and emptiness – this is the true nature of reality.
This is the awakened mind, the enlightened mind, a state of mental consciousness that “neither exists nor does not exist.” If you do not understand this last phrase, that is fine, for neither do I really, and neither do the millions who have studied the sutras (sacred texts). If we did understand,
