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The Himalayas: Wanderers from the West
BY W. K. JACKSON
(continued)
After spending time in various locations throughout India (and finding out first hand the meaning of “getting ripped off”, once paying 9,000 rupees for a room that should have cost 200), Phil found himself in Calcutta where the “dirty, horrible place” constrained him to seek out a temporary asylum from the mass of humanity in India’s brand name city. He hopped on a train to Siliguri, a town just south of the foothills, and during the ride met a monk who suggested he stay at his friend’s monastery near Darjeeling. The advice proved fruitful, for Phil ended up not only staying at the monastery but also teaching English as well to twenty grateful monks in residence there.
“One day all the monks were getting ready to go somewhere and I followed them,” Phil recalled. “They were going to Darjeeling, where the Dalai Lama was giving teachings, which I heard.”
Unexpectedly crossing paths with the Dalai Lama made an impression on the young man, who immediately decided to apply the former’s instruction on compassion into his own life. He returned to Calcutta and for two weeks worked at the Home for Destitute and Dying. Following a brief interlude, during which he roamed about Sikkim visiting temples, villages, and Buddhist sacred sites, he returned for the third time to Calcutta. For two more months he volunteered at Mother Theresa’s.
Now Phil is in the mountains, learning Tibetan and searching for answers.
“Maybe I’m starting something that will be really interesting to me,” he said. “What people look for is a sense of direction. I haven’t found it yet.”
But here, in the hills, he just might.
* * *
Constanzo Allione, 24, is an only son, though he would have had a twin if she had lived more than a few months after birth. The child of an Italian documentary filmmaker (“from Siberian Shamanism to Beat Poets to Bob Marley,” he says of the broad spectrum of his father’s work) and his mother, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Costanzo was a practicing Buddhist until the age of 14, when a Colorado boarding school, far from his New York home, effectively put an end to his religious ways.
“The politics of Buddhism turned me off, plus I was more interested in girls,” he said.
But a childhood spent under the tutelage of his mother, one of the first Western women to become a nun under the 16th Karmapa, and author of Women of Wisdom (Penguin), is not easily forgotten. So when the tax of college life grew almost unbearable (“I was breaking up with my girlfriend and my life was moving too fast,” he says) Costanzo naturally turned to the one permanent source of spirituality in his life: his mother.
“I asked my mother for some instruction on some very simple [Buddhist] practice, concentrating on the breath,” he said.
Scarcely a month later, the pressured student paid a visit to his mother at the Tara Mandala Buddhist Retreat Center in Colorado and met a Tibetan lama there who was destined to change the course of his life.
“In that instant of meeting him,” he recounted, “I felt devotion like I’ve never felt with anyone else in a matter of seconds, saying hello, having him touch my head.”
That weekend Costanzo “took refuge” (“kind of like the Christian baptism for Buddhists,” he explains). Even in the midst of a new job at a laboratory in Baltimore, where the recent graduate used bacterial phages as an alternative to antibiotics, the weekend in Colorado had motivated him to practice Buddhism “full on”. Even before taking up the position, he requested – and was granted – a six-month leave to visit Tibet and India. Unfortunately, September 11th 2001 came between him and his overseas dream.
Instead of international adventures, the boy from Rome decided to journey through the United States with his girlfriend. The period was bittersweet, culminating not in three months of retreat in a solitary cabin, as planned, but rather in a breakup after only thirty days.
Baltimore could only contain the newly re-invigorated Buddhist for so long, and within four months he had left the lab and returned to Colorado. He secured a job at the dharma center as land manager, running work crews and building cabins. For two years, Costanzo did nothing with his degree in molecular genetics, opting instead for Buddhist practice.
Inaugurating those two years, however, was his meeting with Paloma (“dove” in Spanish).
“It was love at first sight,” he said. “She introduced herself and we kind of ran away from society to live together at Tara Mandala.”
More recently, he was the one running, and with the generous support of Paloma, he enrolled as a student at Manjushree in Darjeeling to learn Tibetan. Costanzo plans further travel in India and Tibet, but his main reason for picking up the new and very difficult language is to better understand Buddhism. Energetically he explained to me the concepts of his philosophy on life, peppered with Buddhist terminology and the scientific jargon of his university days. Despite his convictions, however, Constanzo nonetheless gives the impression of one who is searching. One of the driven.
And seeing as he is currently living in the foothills of the Himalayas, that isn’t all that surprising.
“I probably want to study some type of nature medicine in the future,” Constanzo said. “But before that I want to do a long retreat. That’s my immediate plan and it’s hard to say anything beyond that.”
The Italian-American hasn’t ruled out a family, though he has also given serious to thought to a hermit’s life, “maybe even becoming a monk”.
But here, in the hills, Costanzo longs for the opportunity to go on retreat, like his 18th century idol Jigme Lingpa, a Tibetan saint and reputedly the reincarnation of the great dharma-king Trisong Detsen. A great scholar, at the age of 21 Jigme Lingpa “realized the nature of his mind” and began a three-year retreat, high in the mountains, in complete solitude. In the seclusion of icy mountain peaks that loomed like sentinels guarding the mind’s most sublime secrets, Jigme Lingpa saw visions.
* * *
This morning the sky was clear, cloudless, for the first time since my arrival in the hillside town of Darjeeling. That meant that the mountains weren’t invisible.
I left my house and rounded the hill, finally coming to a bench that was part of what looked like a bus stop despite the fact that no motor vehicles were allowed here; probably a remnant of British influence. Taking a seat on the old bench, I looked out and was greeted by a chain of snow-capped peaks that stretched right and left to the horizon, like Titans. Kanchenjunga dwarfed them all, rising up like the mother Titan spewing swirling trails of snow and mist from her summit. The view was spectacular, made more glorious by the realization that any one of these peaks in front of me was taller than the highest mountain in the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, or the Urals. In those vegetation-free valleys, carved out by millions of years of glacial movement and flanked by protruding rock and boulders as big as hotels, one can get about as close to the sky as possible and still be on the ground.
In the mountains, heaven is close.
* * *
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