I’ve posted this story before in a comment to Anitra, so now I will post a longer version for everyone.

A couple years ago, I did a two month retreat at Karme Ling. It was the winter that the lama house was being renovated. The roof was about to come off, it was very cold, and Lama Tsultrim was quite sick. There was a lot to do and not enough people to do it, so even though I was on retreat, I decided to give a few hours of help each day.

One day when I checked in at the lama house, I found Lama Karuna looking stressed. She needed to clean out Rinpoche’s work room, pretty much immediately, and had no help. I’m sure everyone knows what a pack rat Rinpoche was… it was a huge job! So I pitched in and together we got it done. Rinpoche was sitting in his room across the hall, spinning his prayer wheel in his big recliner, for those few hours. Lama Karuna was packing the boxes and I was bringing them down the hall, piling them all around Rinpoche and stacking them as high as I could. He kept talking to me in his broken English, thanking me repeatedly and cracking jokes to put me at ease.

Now, that workroom was sort-of like the loaves and the fishes… the more we took out, the more there was. It was really like a mind-expanding emptiness teaching, since it actually makes no rational sense how that little room could hold so much stuff that we could barely fit the boxes, stacked several high, into Rinpoche’s much larger room. Here is just a partial list of some of what I can remember. Many, many rolls of brocade. Large tubs of incense and sacred substances for filling statues. Big bags of rice. Many boxes and special containers of pills of various kinds. Drawers and drawers of tools for metal working, carpentry, sewing, etc. Large pieces of sheet copper in odd shapes. Things from Tibet I couldn’t begin to recognize. Musical instruments. Measuring implements (yardsticks, tapes, etc). Texts. Beads. Pearls. A sewing machine and lots of cloth and thread. Lamps and electric cords. Pieces of statues in various degrees of deconstruction/reconstruction. Some of those colorful glass statues that have started to become popular. Images on paper and in photos. Hand written notes in Tibetan. Extra sets of eyeglasses. Push pins. Tape. Glue. Lots and lots of glue.

It is also no secret that Rinpoche was practically blind by the end. One statue which he filled for me not long ago came to me in the mail covered in Rinpoche’s fingerprints in glue. I cried as I carefully cleaned my newly blessed statue, thinking that a good part of the actual blessing was my 95 year old teacher’s devotion to his students and to the dharma… shown in his willingness to fill statues he could literally barely see. Anyway, back to packing up Rinpoche’s workroom: the floor was littered with many small things that had escaped his grasp. When we had cleaned out the room, Lama Karuna and I got down on our hands and knees to retrieve the various escaped blessing pills of all sizes. She gave them to me, and I still have them in a small box.

I carefully put the rolls of brocade neatly on Rinpoche’s bed in his room, and covered them with a cloth. This situation did not last long however. Lama Karuna and I found Rinpoche unrolling all the brocades, making a huge mess on his bed. There was almost no room for him to stand up among all the boxes, but this did not slow him down. He was admiring the brocades with a great sense of relish and discovery; probably, being such a pack rat, he had long since forgotten what he had! At one point, he was looking at a gorgeous deep purple silk brocade with gold embroidery. Looking at a stylized figure, Lama Karuna said, “Rinpoche, what IS that?” And Rinpoche relied in his thick accent with obvious relish, “Dragon.”

Amy sent this photo of the “new” workroom created for Khenpo Rinpoche at Karme Ling …

At the end of the day, they gave me a ride back to my retreat cabin, which was right next to Lama Karuna’s. Rinpoche was living with her while the lama house was being renovated, and she asked me to go around to the passenger side and help Rinpoche up the steps into her cabin while she parked the car. I ran around to Rinpoche’s door, noting with trepidation how icy the steps looked. To my surprise though, Rinpoche did not appear to be leaning heavily on my arm; on the contrary, I could barely feel any weight. He seemed to be floating up the few steps. I thought to myself with relief, “No problem.” Just then, Rinpoche playfully said in English, “No problem!” and seemingly floated into the house.