A Family Practice

James and Michal Sarzotti and their children, Cory, 14, and Jenna, 7, live in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. They are one of the growing number of Buddhist families that live along the Hudson River.

On September 7, 1977, His Eminence, the Venerable Deshung Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master and at that time one of the senior-most masters of the Sakya Order as well as a guru to His Holiness the Sakya Trizin, started an extensive teaching on The Three Visions to a small group of students in New York City. It was the preparatory level of study and practice of the Lam Dre, or "Path and Fruit" teachings, which are seminal to the Sakya School. This "root teaching" gives extensive instruction on the fundamental points of the impure vision of conventional beings, the experiential vision of meditators, and the pure vision of enlightened beings, or Buddhas. By tremendous good fortune, we were being taught the necessary foundations, and given the essential blessings for our own future spiritual transformations akin to those of the lineage masters, who are in themselves the last word, and embodied proof, of the school’s truth. We all hoped to stand on the shoulders of giants.
Rinpoche, by teaching to our particular, and disparate, level of spiritual development, both cited and demonstrated the saintly bodhisattva’s conduct as our model. He encouraged a spiritual orientation motivated by the love of all beings through a selfless concern for them. As our knowledge and aspirations grew along the lines of generosity, moral conduct, patience, vigor, meditation, and insight, he constantly exhorted us to gather the two heaps of "merit and wisdom" necessary to Buddhahood. We well remember Rinpoche at that time saying that of the profound preliminary and advanced esoteric practices, “It is the deep teachings that are given first.” The depth of these first teachings is still the core of what has become our "family practice," and the dharma family that we are today is owed to that fortuitous meeting and priceless tutelage with Rinpoche.

During and after those teachings, Michal and I, who were not married then, individually had the opportunity to spend time living with Rinpoche, learning his prayers, and eating and talking with him. We became hooked on his extraordinary attitude, his magnanimous outlook, his substance, his manners—and the caring he felt for life and all its beings. Once, while Michal was staying at the center with Rinpoche and his brother, Dr. Kunsang Nyima, preparing for a retreat, she observed her teacher’s great compassion up close.

“It was a hot, humid day in New York, and the many windows were open to let the occasional breeze waft through. But rather than letting in a cool breeze, the open windows invited in a multitude of insects. One particularly obnoxious fly landed on our donuts and dive-bombed our eyes. I could not help thinking mean thoughts about this pesky being. After numerous attempts to brush it away from our breakfast, I looked up to see this bug walking along the rim of Rinpoche’s teacup, and before I knew it, he had fallen in and drowned. I was horrified that Rinpoche’s tea had been ruined. Rinpoche was horrified, too, but not for the same reason. He scooped up that fly from his hot tea and held him in the palm of his hand. He held that fly as if it were his most precious child. He leaned over the fly’s wet little body and said prayers. He smoothed the rumpled little wings and whispered to him. That nameless bug then became for me a tiny being receiving his bardo instructions and all of Rinpoche’s overwhelming love and compassion. I have never seen anyone treat even another person with such tenderness.”

Rinpoche was a role model for faithfulness in relationships to all beings, human and otherwise. Like no one else we had ever known, he cleared up a lot of confusion. Rinpoche taught us not only meditation, but also skills for living. He was the absolute model for living the dharma, from saying prayers for dead bugs to sorting out family squabbles, to teaching the most profound doctrines. He raised us in the dharma, and even though we were ignorant and childish in our desires, we learned at least that there was a need for something greater than our own narrow concerns. We had tasted his level of love and compassion, his profound wisdom, and his many other priceless qualities, and did not want to be separated from them.

After a while, it dawned on us that Rinpoche wasn’t always going to be available to us in the same way. Being in the company of monks, being allowed to experience the world of renunciation and commitment to the Buddha’s teaching made us view life from a different perspective. The monastic life was the Buddha’s "brainchild," as the Venerable Lama Pema Wangdak has said. The vows and rules of conduct found in the Vinaya, the Buddha’s teaching for the community of monks and nuns, created for the first time all the best causes and conditions for spiritual growth within a community. To give up one's self-centered interests, to devote one's self to a life of hard inner work and compassion for all beings is a daunting choice and one deserving of profound respect. What better work, what higher purpose could there be than this kind of life that was revealed to us at Deshung Rinpoche’s Jetsun Sakya Center?

Both Michal and I desired to make Rinpoche’s example our way of life. We felt, however, that the center would not hold, on many levels, and in order to preserve what we had learned, we needed to create a foolproof alternative to the mainstream values. We wanted to take the dharma home with us. We wanted to make it work, so we decided to marry and create a nuclear family, but we wanted to bring to it the views and values we had learned from Buddhism.

Now that we have children, and are undeniably householders, one might ask how we maintain a genuine sense of spiritual continuity, especially since it was fostered by a monastic lifestyle. Well, one thing Rinpoche taught us was that you never know who is a Buddha, and this should inform the way one treats all beings. When our son, Cory, received his dharma name, Deshung Rinpoche said, “This is the name of my best friend from childhood.” It was unforgettable—Rinpoche, sitting in his chair, an imposing figure of age and size, looking down upon this tiny little person who could barely sit up, and saying, “Jamyang Samphel was my best friend.” And this was not the first time Deshung Rinpoche had intimated that there was no difference between the person who has the dharma name now and the one who had it in the past. In referring to how one of our sangha members had the same name as a previous Dalai Lama, Rinpoche said, “You are him. You are that Sonam Gyatso!” We are of course not talking about tulkus here, but rather the inseparability of beings. Again, when our daughter Jenna was born, on the same date as Deshung Rinpoche’s parinarvana, she became a constant reminder of him, and every time we celebrate her birth date, we also celebrate Rinpoche’s parinarvana. This continuity of beings, the close connection between them, and the care Rinpoche demonstrated toward them is our spiritual continuity, and it continues to shape our intentions in raising Cory and Jenna.

Within our family, there is an enduring connection between us born from, as Tibetans say, "our own lama," and from that perspective, what our family is, is a little sangha of four. At home, we say Rinpoche’s prayers at meals, and we feel the children are comfortable with all the things that are part of the dharma. There is a solidarity between our family practice and the lamas we have met, who have taught and teach us, that makes them and their lineages an integral part of our life, just like any family relations. And for our children, as first generation American Buddhists, this formative influence, beginning with the Venerable Deshung Rinpoche, is part of their heritage. In picking us as parents, they were born into a situation in which they have access to a lot of spiritual ancestors, an entire lineage, which is like having a lot of wonderful family relations. So, for instance, when they see a monk or nun walking down the street, they are reminded of, and may even feel as though they are a part of, that greater community. For us, when we were just coming to Buddhism, finding a bona fide spiritual friend, or a real guru, was almost more than we hoped for, as it was an end in itself of the searcher's journey. But to our children, who grew up with Deshung Rinpoche and other great lamas, it is a given. They have an entire spiritual family, and it is as ordinary to them as a family "refuge" tree.

Our son, having grown up virtually in the laps of his parents' precious gurus, has been heard to remark, “How would you face the lamas if you ever left the dharma?” Our daughter, in first grade, has drawn pictures of dogs with multiple arms, hand ornaments, and miniature gurus sitting with flames above their heads. The iconography of Vajrayana has clearly become part of her world. On the other hand, she has been heard to remark that the real reason prayers are said before meals is to let the food cool down. And our son, when asked about his participation in recent Losar and Monlam festivities, said, surprisingly to us, “I’m just along for the ride.” We were hoping he meant the vehicle in which he was riding was the Vajrayana, or at least, that he was "resting" in the Middle Way. But these days, you can’t be too sure. And after all, we may be "noble sons and daughters from a good family," but illusion-projecting parents we still are. We tell ourselves they could, given the surprising, preemptive nature of karma, grow up to be many things we will not understand, nor approve of. But we also realize the formative influences are just that, karma shaping, and the seeds of compassionate and wise role models, such as the lamas provide, hopefully increase the chances for our children’s Buddha qualities to fruit. In this way, our offspring are no different from their senior sangha members, with the major difference remaining that they are not "converts." They are the first generation of American Tibetan Buddhists.

Our children find Christian topics, such as, the death of Christ on the cross, the three persons in one God, and the Creation story of Adam and Eve with the apple and the evil serpent, interesting, and they talk with their Christian friends about the differences in their respective religions. Perhaps this is because my wife, Michal, and I have openly "debated" Buddhist doctrine in front of our children since their births. It is a familial, as well as constitutional, freedom. Our son, older by seven years than our seven-year-old daughter, grasps logical fallacies and subtle contradictory "view issues" about the inherit "problems" of origin. Whereas our daughter just blurts out, “Then who made God? And who made the God that made that God?” These sorts of "religious discussions" poignantly prove the need for authentic religious training, whether Christian, Buddhist, or any of the other great religions. Within all this discussion, to us, one thing always remains a constant: the purity and potency of the light from Tibet in the form of the authentic religion of the Buddhas, the Mahasiddhas, the great translators and gurus, monks and nuns, which now has been made very accessible to us all, especially in the presence of the many dharma centers, their qualified teachers, and the many aptly translated dharma texts, such as, The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception, just incidentally having been written by "our own lama," the Venerable Deshung Rinpoche.