I was on a meditation retreat in the south of France when a visiting master was introduced to the group. An audience of over three hundred Western students of Buddhism waited quietly for him to speak. He was about forty years old, quite tall and broad-shouldered for a Tibetan, with an enormous presence likea mountain, though he barely smiled. As he began to talk he repeatedly wiped at his draining right eye, as if something in him was constantly crying, but his voice remained strong. Soon his personal story unfolded.
For fifteen years, as a young man, this Rinpoche and his elderly master had been imprisoned inside Tibet as victims of Chinese persecution. Although he did not go into details, the conditions they had had to endure were of the roughest sort, with many days spent chained together in their dark, dirty cell. The Chinese, he said, not content with normal torture, had been determined to persecute devout Tibetans in the worst possible way by denying them the right to meditate; every time their eyes closed they were beaten. But because the Chinese did not understand that Tibetans actually meditate with their eyes open, the two were able to continue their prayers and meditations in secret. Unfortunately, as the years went by, the abuse only got worse; in fact, Rinpoche’s constantly tearing eye was the result of beatings from that time. He had even had to endure the loss of his master, who died next to him one night in their cell. After many years of torture, escape from this living hell had come to seem impossible. But then one day, out of the blue, two of the jailers addressed him directly: “What are you doing?” they said. “No matter what we do to you, now matter how we hurt you, nothing moves you.” Apparently the jailers had practiced all sorts of martial arts, but they had finally met a power they didn’t understand. “You know something we don’t,” they told him, “and because we are the jailers, we must learn it in order to become stronger than you.”
So because he had no other weapon, he taught his jailers the very practice he and his master had been doing—the Tibetan meditation called Tonglen, which is the practice of breathing in the suffering of others and breathing out light. It was the same practice that many of us had been learning at this retreat with some struggle, for to actually take on the suffering of others with no sense of martyrdom or resentment is a great affront to one’s ego.
So, to imagine that this monk and his elderly master had found the inspiration to not only practice compassion but to teach it in the middle of hell to the very beings who were the agents of their suffering . . . well, that was a level of compassion that transcends the ordinary mind. And yet, that is the essence of Buddhist compassion. And as a result, as Rinpoche told it, the unbelievable happened. One day, some time later, the Chinese jailers suddenly announced to their Tibetan captive that they were releasing him from jail. No reason. Just his time was up. And they set him free.And that is how he came to be before us on that bright sunny day in the south of France, with his eye running like a persistent rain of remembrance, his gaze brilliantly clear, his posture immovable like a warrior’s.
In fact, as I remember it now, there was not even a trace of resentment in his voice, only perhaps the bittersweet irony that his master had not lived to see that somewhere between the in-breath and the out-breath,the boundary between persecutor and persecuted had finally dissolved.
—Pamela Bloom
An effortless compassion can arise for all beings who have not realized their true nature. So limitless is that if tears could express it, you would cry without end.
—Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche
From THE POWER OF COMPASSION: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul, and Change the World (Hampton Roads, 2010).
A visual experience of this story can be found on YouTube:
www.YouTube.com/thepowerofcompassion under the video "From Victim to Liberator.