Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
Years ago, I heard with some amusement a comment that fell
from an unnamed Tibetan lama’s lips: “Buddha was the world’s
biggest liar!” At the time, I thought the words funny but unfounded. Now,
after a little more study of Buddha’s Sacred Word, I am forced to admit
that the lama may have a point. Our Refuge, our Guide, our Teacher, once
the Light of Asia and now the Light of the World, was a sly and slippery
salesman for enlightenment. He said whatever it took to lead his audience
to spiritual awakening, and he was astute enough to know that it wasn’t
always the truth that set beings free or even set them on the path to freedom.
None of us is fortunate enough to have met the Buddha; we meet his
representatives, modern spiritual masters. And true to the Buddha’s example,
some of them are creative with the truth some of the time. I have in
mind two stories of my teacher, Kalu Rinpoché.
A Canadian woman, one of his first Western disciples, visited him a
few months before he passed away. He said, “Do you remember that first
time we met? I asked your age, then told you that you had reached the ideal
age and stage—neither too old, nor too young—to practice Buddhism.”
The woman had been forty-something at the time. Now, more than
twenty years later, she replied, “Of course I remember! That meeting
changed my life.” She had let her career slide and had eventually entered
retreat, first a three-year retreat, then a life devoted to contemplation and
retreat that continues to this day.
Rinpoché smiled a little impishly and said, “Well, right after you left,
the next person who came to see me was a young woman in her early
twenties, and I told her exactly the same thing!”
I suspect that at the end of his life the Buddha took the same glee in
recalling his own skillful means.
The second story, in a similar vein, is pertinent to this book.
In 1974 I had my first personal interview with Kalu Rinpoché. I had
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