As the search for the Lotus-Born Master began, it was time to revive the old Shambhala Studio, which I had used to produce a trilogy of films themed around finding a portal to the halcyon realm of Shambhala from 2002–06. These older films were: Searching for Shangri-la, Conversations with Sacred Mountains, and Shambhala Sutra.
Returning to my role as film director in 2018, I gathered together the team that had ventured with me a decade before, during the Shangri-la expeditions.
Dou Yan, our cinematographer, had already been recognized as arguably the most experienced cinematographer on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. We began intensive planning sessions together networking across the Himalayas with lamas, scholars and other experts on the life and times of the Lotus-Born Master. Johnston Li from Hong Kong was one of the most profound Buddhist scholars I had met, and he soon headed up our research team.
Now the first question: which manifestation should we begin with?
There are many different versions of the Lotus-Born Master’s Eight Manifestations. Versions vary according to each branch of Tibetan Buddhism, sub-sect, the tertöns who are revealing the Guru’s legacy, or artists who are leaving impressions of his story and manifestations on murals and thangkas. Moreover, the order in which the manifestations are arranged is often based on the structural powers of compassion (or wrathfulness) that they exude, rather than the order in which the Lotus-Born Master assumed these manifestations during his own life journey.
However, in Searching for the Lotus-Born Master, his life journey was where I wanted to begin, as each manifestation actually represented a different stage of his own personal journey and enlightenment.
Therefore, the search for the Lotus-Born Master really began by searching for his different manifestations and how each fit into the story of his life. . . and, moreover, what each independently represents.
What we were discovering was that each manifestation occurred in a different location. If you connected the dots and the time frames in which each manifestation occurred, a pathway emerged of the Lotus-Born Master’s own journey, travelling from his birthplace in Oddiyana to the charnel grounds of India, onwards to Nepal, Bhutan and the Tibetan regions of China.
The manifestations were, in fact, different stages of his personal journey toward re-enlightenment. Or, they are better understood as life pathways in mastering different tantric practices. Each would eventually coalesce in his unique teaching system, which in turn became what we know today as Tibetan Buddhism.
We began to plan our expeditions according to the historic timeline of each manifestation, where it took place, and how it represented the Guru’s own evolution, personality and practice-wise, in his journey to become who he would be.
The historic dimension also gave us the challenge of proving his legend to be true, as so much was wrapped in mystery and local lore. We decided to literally follow his personal life path step by step, understanding each manifestation, as a stage of his life story and history. It soon became our own journey to realization.
Actually, each manifestation also represented a specific tantric practice. While the Lotus-Born Master had more than eight manifestations, the core eight have been designated as such in Buddhist literature and art. This is because they represent eight paths or doorways into the mandala of his mind, or the universal hologram if we wish to understand it in quantum physics terms. Each manifestation as a specific practice can bring one into Rigpa, the field of ultimate emptiness. However, if one masters all eight, then they become a true master.
The message that I had received, “My Eight Manifestations are eight quantum energy fields. Now go tell the world,” had a scientific dimension that had to be decoded alongside the meaning of the Eight Manifestations themselves. This in turn brought me to San Francisco, where many technology and science experts were on the cutting edge of quantum physics. But they also were fighting the constraints of scientific methodology that limited their own ability to break through.
The Lotus-Born Master’s teachings are all about breaking through. The duality of perception that governs scientific empirical study goes out the door. The Guru’s approach is intrinsically intrusive as a mind training system that drives one to juxtapose their thinking with the non-reality that does not actually exist around us. Every day, through a mirage of perceptions, we are conditioned to believe is reality. Actually, it is all illusion.
This way of thinking plunges one into an irrational void which threatens the security that everyone so desperately seeks to hold on to while living. The world we live in is ephemeral, as much as we wish to hold on to solidity. The Lotus-Born Master casts all of this out into the wind and scatters it, before bringing everything back together in a rainbow matrix of marvel captured in a single moment of living. This is gone before you realize that you have lived it. When you can live it, be in that singularity of any moment, well. . . maybe you are actually correlating with the Guru’s mind space.
I went searching for answers concerning the science of it all in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was to connect with the vibe of where it all began, when Tibetan Buddhism became popular in West, more or less beginning in the Bay Area. In fact, there is a brass plaque in downtown Berkeley that reads “There are more Buddhists in Berkeley than Tibet,” capturing the moment of a movement as it spread throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the familiar time during which I grew up. Yet I would discover that the technology and science community had more questions than me.
To get back that old vibe, I went to San Rafael, an old hippie town near San Francisco, to meet with Rob Parenteau, a professional financier who has spent his life in California when not travelling throughout Asia understanding tantric Buddhism. On the outskirts of San Rafael, he was tending his own organic farm while studying the tantric practices that we were about to document on our upcoming expeditions. Rob could offer me insights into the Lotus-Born Master’s practices and how they were accepted into the West during the hippie era, and how they could be applied today as we face a race against chaos in both financial markets and political mismanagement globally.
It was like 1969 all over again: an almost kind of retro thing was happening; maybe it was a kind of samsara that our planet repeats while re-inventing itself.
Rob met me for dinner at a Nepalese restaurant in San Rafael. Before going to the restaurant, he insisted that I visit an old hippie bookstore that had been around since the 1960s. The bookstore was famous for its vast collection of metaphysics literature from Taoism, Hinduism, and course, tantric Buddhism. By this time, I thought that I had collected every single written book about the Lotus-Born Master or translation of his texts, at least in English. Sure enough, I was to be proven wrong.
Entering the bookstore with its wafting fragrance of sweet incense, I asked the reception desk whether they had any books on the Lotus-Born Master and his Five Wisdom Dakinis. The lady looked up as if in a dream state, probably from something she had just been smoking, and said ever so softly without even a stutter, “I think we have just gotten something in like that, you know. Yeah.”
Walking over to the bookshelf she pointed at the section. My jaw dropped. Two volumes stared at me bound in elegant orange Tibetan cloth. “The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava Part I, and Part II.” I quickly grabbed them off the shelf. These amazing detailed, illustrated translations of original Tibetan texts were published in 1978. Yes, this was the height of Western enthusiasm and interest in the magic of Tibetan Buddhism.
We were going to prove that this body of teachings is the original science of quantum physics.
I looked at the books again, to see who was the actual author of the original texts. Sure enough, only one name appeared: “Yeshe Tsogyal.”
“These are really treasures from the 1970s,” I exclaimed out loud, turning to the lady as I prepared to pay. “I have seen almost every publication on the Lotus-Born Master. But I have never seen this set of books. It must be a very limited edition, now maybe a one of a kind. How did your bookstore acquire these two volumes?”
She just looked at me wistfully and smiled knowingly. “It was only yesterday, an older South Asian man showed up here. We have never seen him before. He just left the books with us and said, ‘You can sell them to someone who will come here to buy them.’ Then without saying anything else, well, he just left.”
Sure enough, the Guru had given us our expedition roadmap.
Related features from BDG
Decrypting the Sky: Yonphula Rinpoche, a Modern-day Lotus-Born Master
My Encounter with the Lotus-Born Master: The Power of a Single Thought
Padmasambhava’s Buddha-field of Tantric Dances: Re-establishing Dance in the Narrative of Guru Rinpoche
