Opening the Door
To Bön
Latri Geshe Nyima Dakpa
(Snow Lion)

According to Nyima Dakpa, the Bön religion --- also known as Yungdrung Bön --- has been around for 18,000 years. It was the first religion of Tibet. It originally came from a paradise, Olmo Lung Ring, filled with beautiful gardens, stupas, parks, and snow-covered mountains.

The essence of Bön is compassion, love, non-violence, and kindness. Like many Buddhist religions, Bön is a maze of numbers: four virtues, five poisons, nine faults, along with the six qualities of teachers, which include realization, contemplation, detachment, and practice. At the same time, the student must realize the nature of impermanence, the sources of suffering, the law of "cause and result," and the eight realms of life.

Bön is not your feely-touchy discipline. It may even strike one as more of a fundamentalist Buddhism. One of the requirements is that the students should never doubt the teacher ... or as Nyima Dakpa writes, italics his,

Once a practitioner has decided to follow a teacher, the student should never, through his or her limited knowledge, question or judge the value of the teacher.

He adds, "The student should consider the teacher only as pure and perfect." For those of us who fell into (and out of) the world and writings --- and in some cases, the community --- of Rajneesh, these are heavy words indeed.

Even more scary, especially to those of us who are disabled, is the seventh of the "qualities" known as the "Eight Conditions." Dakpa dwells at some length on the "perfect human body," and then on the imperfect one:

If you are born as a disabled ... person, although you have the opportunity to receive the teachings, you will not be able to understand their essence. For instance, if you are blind, you have no ability to receive blessings by seeing the enlightened ones and the teachers. If you are deaf, there is no chance to hear the words of the teachings. If you are dumb, you cannot recite and discuss the meaning of the teachings.

To some of us raised in the humanist tradition --- which says that all of us are capable of everything that is not patently impossible --- this seems a bit arbitrary. Disability can be an impediment to those who permit it to be an impediment, but for a religion to see it as a cage from which we cannot escape comes as a sour note in the ears of those of us who are trying our damndest.

Dakpa's Bön reminds us of some of the dour chapters out of the Old Testament, ones that say that a person with a "blemish" can never enter the church. For instance, Leviticus 21 says,

For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach [the temple]: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous,

Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded,

Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones [testicles] broken...

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Finally, there are Dakpa's dark thoughts on motherhood:

When your mother sleeps, you feel pressure as though you were under a huge mountain. When your mother moves, it is like 'riding a wild horse.' When your mother eats hot or cold food, you have the experience of suffering from hot or cold.

What's to be said at this point? We fans of the concept of the "birth trauma" remember the womb as a kindly, oceanic place, all our needs taken care of, our time there a pastoral one, when we are cozily riding through inner-space, having a blissed out nine months, listening in on privileged conversations.

Perhaps Dakpa has a special insight into this before-life life, but we would prefer to think of our time there as one of being in the ultimate, or primary, cave of Warmth and Plenty.

--- Margurite Devon, M. D.