In 1968 in Darjeeling, Chatral Rinpoche had a famous meeting with the Trappist Monk, Father Thomas Merton.
Merton wrote of the encounter:
“.... And there was Chatral, the greatest Rinpoche that I have met so far and a very impressive person. Chatral looked like a vigorous old peasant in a Bhutanese jacket tied at the neck with thongs and a red woolen cap on his head.
He had a weeks growth of beard, bright eyes, a strong voice and was very articulate. We started talking about Dzogchen and Nyingma meditation and direct realisation and soon saw that we agreed very well. We must have talked for two hours or more, covering all sorts of ground, mostly around the idea of Dzogchen but also taking in some points of Christian doctrine compared with Buddhist Dharmakaya, the Risen Christ, suffering, compassion for all creatures, motives for " helping others" but all leading back to Dzogchen, the ultimate emptiness, the unity of Shunyata and Compassion, going " beyond the Dharmakaya" and "Beyond God" to the ultimate perfect emptiness.
He said he had meditated in solitude for thirty years or more and had not attained perfect emptiness and I said I hadn't either. The unspoken or half spoken message of the talk was our complete understanding of each other as people who were somehow on the edge of great realisation and knew it and were trying, somehow or other, to go out and get lost in it, and that it was a grace for us to meet one another.
I wish I could see more of Chatral. He burst out and called me a Rangjung Sangay (which apparently means a natural Buddha) and said that he had been named a Sangay Dorje. He wrote "Rangjung Sangay" for me in Tibetan and said that when I entered the " great kingdom" and " the Palace", then America and all that was in it would seem like nothing.
He told me seriously, that perhaps he and I would attain complete Buddhahood in our next lives, perhaps even in this life, and the parting note was a kind of compact that we would both do our best to make it in this life.
I was profoundly moved, because he is so obviously a great man, the true practioner of Dzogchen, the best of the Nyingma Lamas, marked by complete simplicity and freedom..... If I were going to settle down with a Tibetan guru, I think Chatral would be the one I'd choose.”
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton.
“All that occupied me now was the immediate practical problem of getting up my hill with this terrific burden I had on my shoulders, step by step, begging God to drag me along and get me away from my enemies and from those who were trying to destroy me.
I did not even reflect how the Breviary, the Canonical Office, was the most powerful and effective prayer I could possibly have chosen, since it is the prayer of the whole Church, and concentrates in itself all the power of the Church’s impetration, centered around the infinitely mighty Sacrifice of the Mass—the jewel of which the rest of the Liturgy is the setting: the soul which is the life of the whole Liturgy and of all the Sacramentals. All this was beyond me, although I grasped it at least obscurely. All I knew was that I needed to say the Breviary, and say it every day.”
Excerpt From The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition Merton, Thomas
I've read some of the work of Thomas Merton before he went off the deep end. Does anyone else enjoy his work?
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. But because our own resources inevitably fail us, we are all more or less subject to discouragement and to despair. Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves. But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.
- Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 108.
