Robert Chilton is an IT specialist based in New Jersey who works internationally on projects to preserve and share the literary and cultural heritage of the Indo-Tibetan traditions. His current project is www.gompaservices.com. With a BSc in Computer Science and an MA with focus in Tibetan language and Buddhist literature, Robert's interests include philosophy, music, physics, cognitive science, and contemplative practices.

Robert-Chilton.jpg

Robert Chilton

<h4>ROBERT CHILTON has spent most of his adult life keeping alive the written
 traditions of Buddhism in the Tibetan language. The significance of this work is that many of the original Sanskrit
 texts of the Buddha and the early Buddhists were lost, so now these Tibetan texts are the most accurate record we
 have of the Buddha’s teachings. Here he shares with ELIZABETH DENLEY how he
 ended up in Kathmandu and eventually took on this archival work of preserving one of the world’s great traditions.
</h4>
Q: Robert, you’ve been involved with the Tibetan and
 Nepalese monasteries for some time. Can you tell us what you have been doing there?
RC: Well, in a sense it started because I was a
 seeker. I was trying to find a way to have some sort of an authentic spiritual life, first within the Christian
 tradition, and then by a number of interesting ‘coincidences’ I managed to find myself in Kathmandu in Nepal.
I met Tibetan lamas there, and they were not only as knowledgeable as the best
 professors I’ve had at Duke university, but they also had the other side, which was they’d developed a humanness.
 They were both the best scholar you might meet as well as your favorite grandfather or grandmother, who would just
 know what you needed and find a way to give it to you. And I thought, “Okay, this is an authentic path.”
When I first came back after spending about a year and a half in Asia – Nepal, India,
 China – my family and close friends said, “So did you convert to Buddhism?” I said, “No, no, it wasn’t like that. As
 I’ve learned more about the teachings in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, I’ve realized that it’s what I’ve always
 believed. That’s what makes sense to me, and that’s the world I understand and experience. And if that’s what
 Buddhists believe then I’m also a Buddhist, because it makes sense.”
Q: When was this?
RC: This was in 1986, 1987, 1988. Then in 1989 I
 went to the University of Virginia and got a master’s degree.
Q: In Tibetan?
RC: They called it Religious Studies, but my focus
 was Tibetan language and Indo Tibetan Buddhist literature and philosophy. So that was a change, because previously
 I’d studied psychology. I was a major in psychology and computer science at Duke.
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Q: So, the best of both worlds!
RC: In a certain way, but they all pointed in the
 same direction: I was interested in human consciousness and what it could be.
It became apparent to me at that time that Western psychology was really in its infancy
 and that in the East there was much more development of the knowledge of consciousness, psychology, and how to
 develop as a human being. The West was good at developing the material world, but if you wanted to develop the
 human, the mind, at that time it was much, much better to go to Asia.
After I got my degree I had knowledge of Tibetan, and a fair knowledge of Tibetan
 Buddhism. I’d done meditation practice for several years in India, Nepal and also in the USA, as well as studying
 Zen and Insight meditation. And I heard there was a project where they could give me some work, which would combine
 my IT expertise with the fact that I could read Tibetan and knew Tibetan script. It was a project to save Tibetan
 books digitally.
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Of course this was originally an Indian tradition. They were Sanskrit works that were
 translated into Tibetan – many of the Sanskrit originals were lost subsequently – but they were also translated into
 Chinese in some cases. The Chinese already had concepts and philosophy so they tried to map it, and it wasn’t always
 a very good map. The Tibetans really didn’t have philosophy, so they just had to make up new terms to match the
 Sanskrit. So there was a very good correspondence between the meaning they had in Tibet and meaning they had in
 Sanskrit. So in a sense, many of the lost Buddhist treasures of Sanskrit knowledge were preserved in Tibet.
I worked for that project for 15 years as the Technical Director, and it employed
 Tibetan refugees, first in the monasteries and also later in some of these refugee settlements, to type the books.
 They could read Tibetan, and we taught them how to use a normal keyboard and type the Tibetan letters using English
 letters. And they became touch-typists! We didn’t need very expensive computers, and there was also no problem of
 conversion because the English letters were readable universally.
Q: So it was the transliteration of the Tibetan.

RC: Yes. And of course we could convert it anytime
 we wanted to Tibetan script. Also, the people who developed the skills could type anything. They could touch-type at
 high speed. So it was a win-win: we had a very inexpensive labor force by western standards, and they could produce
 a great line of books of over 300,000 pages.
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Q: Tell us about these books.
RC: These are teachings that were attributed to the
 Buddha and also the commentarial tradition of the Indian masters, who followed after the Buddha. They cover all of
 the main four Indian Buddhist philosophical schools. This is another interesting topic, because it’s not like
 there’s only one view to the Buddha’s teachings.
He didn’t teach that there’s one view that everyone has in common; it depends more on
 where you are and what is good for you. There are different ways to look at it, from the point of view of what you
 might call hermeneutics.
There’s a real lesson there about what is true for a person at a certain time. And
 that’s been one of my favorite topics, which I studied and have had a chance to teach as well.
So on one hand I have done this job, and on the other hand I’ve been continuing to study
 because I just really love the meditation and the philosophy and the practice and having the chance to be with the
 lamas and teachers.
Q: So are they translated into English as well?
RC: Yes, there are translations in English of some
 of the books. I don’t even know what percentage it would be, but certainly less than 50% of even just the core canon
 has been translated. I’d probably put the number closer to 20%.
Q: They must be some of the most original Buddhist
 teachings that exist.
RC: Yes. The Pali Canon, which is the southern
 school, has been fully translated into English, and there’s some overlap. But what they call the Kangyur or
 Kanjur in Tibetan, the translated words of the Buddha, is about 85,000 pages.

Then there’s the Tangyur or Tanjur, which is three to four times that
 amount. So by the time we added it all up, it was around a quarter of a million pages.
Q: So are these like the Gospels in the Bible that
 disciples of the Buddha have written?
RC: Well, it was an oral tradition. The Buddha,
 unlike Christ who taught only for 3 years, lived till the age of 80 and he was enlightened when he was 30. So he
 taught for almost 50 years. It was an oral tradition that was passed down for several hundred years before it was
 written.
Q: So what did you learn from this?
RC: One of the most important lessons for me is
 that it’s not a doctrine where we learn to believe what we are told, but rather it’s a method where we’re given the
 tools to see for ourselves how things are and check to see if it’s true.
One of the very famous sayings of the Buddha is, “Just as a goldsmith tests his gold by
 burning, cutting and rubbing it, so you must examine my words and accept them, but not merely out of reverence.” And
 that’s sort of the real thing. If it’s not practical, if it’s not something that you can apply right away in your
 life, then just leave it. You don’t have to say it’s bad, you just leave it aside and say, “Well, may be some other
 time, another place that will be relevant. But what I need to focus on is right here, because this is practical to
 my life right now.”
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I also had another kind of insight. Someone asked me a beautiful question about free
 will and predestination, as they’d heard that I had studied Buddhism for the past few years. I said, “Well, we have
 some very, very limited free will, some very limited ability to make decisions that are really coming from inside
 knowledge. But as we practice, and as we gain more and more awareness, the freedom of movement that’s possible
 expands, and it becomes greater and greater.”
There’s a lot of talk in Buddhism about liberation and Nirvana. What does it
 mean? It can simply be translated as freedom. The question is: How do you get to freedom?
It’s that development that each moment you can make a choice that can either in the
 future make you have less possibility to choose or more possibility to choose. And if you make good choices, you
 expand the number of choices you can make in the future, the range of choices you can make. How do you respond? Do
 you react according to your habits? Or do you have the chance to have that little gap of time where you consider
 “How am I going to respond to this? How am I going to think about this?”
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The Buddhist messages all come from how we think – that’s the first step. If we think
 wrongly, we’re necessarily going to make a wrong decision. It might be good-wrong or bad-wrong, it’s kind of
 interesting. You can do something that you feel is good, for example, you could give money to someone who needs
 something, but if you’re doing it thinking someone’s going to see you doing that, the motivation there is sort of
 mixed. Then there’s really the bad stuff, like, “That’s not mine, but it’s going to be mine now.” That’s just plain
 old bad. And then there is what they call uncontaminated good, which is when you have the right motivation for doing
 a good action and you carry it out, and then you rejoice afterwards, not because someone saw you, but because it’s
 in the nature of goodness, the way the universe is structured.
Daaji was saying that God is the principle and the rules. When you’re in conformance
 with the principle and the rules, then it’s good. And when you are not in conformance, then you have the collisions,
 the problems, the mental afflictions and all that.
Q: How does it work as a Westerner in this tradition? Is
 it a natural fit or are there issues having grown up in a Western culture?
RC: Most of the people I spend time with are not
 Western Buddhists. I spend time with Tibetans. My wife’s family is Mongolian and they’ve been Buddhists for 300
 years, and I spend time in their temples and with their lamas. For myself, I was trained as a scientist and was a
 very skeptical person. My father, who found an Eastern path in the Sikh tradition, would talk about karma and
 rebirth, and I was like, “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m a scientist, and until you can show me it’s true or not true, I’m
 just going to leave it on the table and say maybe yes, maybe no.” So I’d heard about rebirth and reincarnation, I’d
 heard about karma, but I didn’t have any conclusion. I had studied psychology: nature and nurture.
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And then I went to Kathmandu and met Lama Lhundrup, who was the abbot of Kopan
 monastery. His English in the 1980s was of very limited vocabulary, but what he was able to express in an hour and a
 half answered so many of my questions. He completely convinced me that of course there is rebirth and reincarnation,
 and of course I had had multiple lives before. He convinced me that meditation is absolutely necessary. He said,
 “You feed your body every day with food, you have to feed your mind every day with meditation.”
He just hit all the high points in an hour and a half. It gives me chills now even just
 thinking about it, because I’d had all these questions for 5, 6 or 7 years. I’d read Alan Watts, I’d read Thomas
 Merton, and I was like, “Maybe, maybe not, I don’t know.” And then I met this lama and I’m like, “Okay, this is the
 real deal! Now I know where the wisdom lies – at least one of the places where wisdom lies.” Even though it was
 broken English, it was understandable.
To be continued.
<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Interviewed by ELIZABETH DENLEY</h4>
<hr>

A tibetan journey

<h4>ROBERT WELTON is a metaphysician living in Santa Barbara, California. In this
 article from his book, Be Your Own Light, he shares his insights on relationships, soul mates, and love.
</h4>
The purpose of our lives is revealed in our relationships with family, friends, lovers,
 enemies, and everyone we chance to meet. Everyone plays a part in everyone else’s life experience. In great or small
 roles, people appear on the stage of our lives in different costumes, in different lifetimes. Their true character
 or importance may not be recognized except in hindsight.
Mystics report that kindred spirits, like birds of a feather, group together for each
 migration through the material world. These soul support groups encompass all types of people from all walks of life
 because, help or hindrance, friend or foe, all polarities are necessary for allweather navigation and course
 corrections.
The circles of family, friends, work mates, acquaintances and strangers, occupy
 different orbits of intimacy. In friendships we often find our true “family” of soul mates, those with whom we can
 be most intimate and vulnerable. They can bring out the best and the worst in us. Both reflections of personality
 are needed to witness our strengths, and the weaknesses that need exercise.
The success of a relationship depends upon the degree we allow ourselves to become
 vulnerable. We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable selves to be known, and when we honor the spiritual
 connection that grows from that offering, with trust, respect, and affection. When you are in love, you must be
 authentic without any pretense. You must be a flame without any smoke.
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Love is a feeling that defies description in every language. Each experience of love is
 unique and different, combining wings that have never flown together before. Each love passing through our lives
 leads to a greater understanding of ourselves and the beloved. Love is a bridge that connects us to the wisdom of
 our hearts.
Love, like happiness, is not perfected until it is shared. You cannot kiss your own
 lips. Paulo Coelho, the famous Brazilian novelist of The Alchemist, wrote, “Love is not found in someone
 else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only
 makes sense when we have someone else to share our feelings with.”
Love is the Alchemy, the magic Elixir of Life that transforms two into One. In love, the
 different colors of your being become unified as one pure white light. Hindus call this state of being,
 Ananda, meaning, happiness, joy and bliss. In every life Signs appear, pointing the same way as all Masters
 have pointed. The Path to Happiness and Joy follows Love wherever it goes.

Raymond Moody, an American medical researcher of near death experiences and author of
 the bestseller, Life After Life, wrote, “People who return from near death experiences tell us that in the
 seeming closing moments of their earthly lives, they learned that the most important thing we can do while we are
 here is to learn to love.” Once you have learned to love, you will have learned to live.
<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Article by ROBERT WELTON 
 Art by JASMEE RATHOD</h4>
<hr>

A flame without smoke

<h4>ROBERT CHILTON has spent most of his adult life working with traditions of
 Buddhism in the Tibetan language. In Part 1, he shared the significance of this work in preserving the most accurate
 record we have of the Buddha’s teachings. In part 2, he tells ELIZABETH DENLEY
 about the Gompa Tibetan Monastery Services, where technology is used to connect the monasteries with followers, and
 create a platform for sharing the ancient wisdom.</h4>
Q: So what is happening now with the Tibetan monasteries? I don’t mean politically, but
 is the tradition alive still?
RC:&nbsp;These great masters were able to come out
 in the early 1960s. They eventually were able to reform the monasteries and continue their training. They were in
 refugee camps, first in Indian prisons, and then they were in these camps where they were living in tents with
 keep-guards to keep the elephants from rampaging through the camps. They went through a lot of hardships, but they
 were able to keep transmitting the knowledge.
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The system of the monasteries is all about how to keep the knowledge alive from one
 generation to the next. And that was happening in Tibet since the time it was transmitted from India, in places like
 the great monastery in Nalanda and other great monasteries in India. They kept it going, and up till now they’ve
 been able to keep it going.
It used to be that every extended family would send at least one boy to the monastery to
 become a monk. It was just normal. And there were all these people in Tibet who were also coming into India through
 Nepal and Bhutan, and they would come into the monasteries and take up their spaces, cohorts in their classes, but
 recently the police forces have stopped that flow.
The monasteries and nunneries are doing great things in their local communities in terms
 of social welfare programs. They’re the ones who establish the clinics. They have hospitals, library resources, and
 there are people for any spiritual needs to be met in various ways, such as with prayers and advice, giving names to
 the children and blessings, and so on. All this plays a very vital role within the refugee communities in India and
 Nepal. Also, people in these communities have found ways to go abroad, to Malaysia, Singapore, USA, Canada and
 Australia.
There’s a need for them to have access to spiritual services, and that’s the project I’m
 working on now. That’s called Gompa Services, or Gompa Tibetan Monastery Services. Gompa Services is an online
 service platform that connects more than 50 monasteries and nunneries in India and Nepal to the world of their
 followers.
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If people want to watch a webcast of a teaching, or some special ceremonies or a public puja, or if they want to
 arrange their own personal puja with a dedication for a specific purpose, they can do all that through the website.
 If they want to make donations toward other social projects, like the ones that help expand a library or build
 needed dormitories, they can make offerings through our service. We don’t charge any fees on those transactions.
We have members who help support the functions. It’s been going on since we started in
 2014, and we really got launched in the last couple of years. We started a publicity launch a few months ago, in
 terms of making ourselves widely known, after we had made sure everything was working well.
Q: So is this mainly for India and Nepal, or is it global?
RC:&nbsp;The monasteries and nunneries that we’ve
 been connecting through the platform have been in India and Nepal. Our main coordinating office is in Dehra Dun,
 which is in North India. And we also do webcasting up in the North: whenever we have any events we send our crews
 out for the webcasting. We also have one in the South in Karnataka state that covers the southern region. There are
 a number of monasteries in that area, where people arrange pujas on demand. And then we also have our Kathmandu
 office for most of Nepal. There are other places, but it is mainly Kathmandu where most of the monasteries and
 nunneries are located.
We have recently been looking at bringing individual Dharma Centers – where they have
 events or teachings that are relevant to the community or followers worldwide – into our platform. Basically we have
 a system of providing for the distribution of the webcasts, which is all integrated. People can sign in with a user
 ID, they can make donations or not, it’s up to them.
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But most of what’s really happening, in terms of the big events, is happening in the
 monasteries and the nunneries, especially for the arranged pujas. You have 200 monks who do the prayer for half a
 day, and there’s an energy. It’s really extraordinary when there are that many people all doing the same practice,
 and they’re trained to do it.
Q: There’s a history of Buddhism in the Indo-Nepali part
 of the country, which goes back to the original traditions.
RC:&nbsp;Yes, that’s definitely true, but it’s much
 more. I think in our educational system we value empirical evidence. What people are only starting to realize
 broadly is that the foundations of what we call empirical evidence are completely subjective in a sense. For
 example, first there was Einstein and his theory of general relativity. Then you had Neils Bohr and Heisenberg and
 the whole quantum worldview, which has taken a long time for the average person in the West to even understand.
One of my personal hobbies is to study quantum physics, and luckily I have enough
 mathematical and scientific training that I can sort of follow it. What I find fascinating is that when I read one
 of the early Indian philosophers, Nagarjuna, and his presentation of the Middle Way, he says that nothing exists the
 way it appears to, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When I put that up against the quantum worldview, as I
 understand it, there’s a way I can interpret the data coming from quantum theory that lines up pretty closely with
 what was said 2000 years ago in India. So we’re going back to what the Indians have always been teaching, and what
 the West is finally coming to.
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Another great example is that the English and other scholars, who encountered Indian
 philosophy in the 1800s, dismissed it as very speculative: There was this idea that there’s not just a world, but
 countless world systems; these huge universal world systems. What were they thinking? They were just trying to do
 this kind of mental gymnastics and see who could outdo whom, and turn to describing the physical world.
And then you know, a century and a half later, guess what? The West is saying that there
 are all these multiple millions and uncountable world systems. It’s all expanding, and whether it’s going to
 contract or not contract, we do not know. Everything of the Indian philosophies that was laughed at as ridiculous,
 now is acknowledged as the way it is, according to the West.
My mother-in-law is a nurse, and she had been studying both her nursing and Indian
 explanations of karma when she came across a passage in one of the early Indian books. If you look at who has the
 biggest karmic impact, in terms of doing a good action or a bad action, one of the biggest is the parent, the mother
 in particular. And then there was a recorded case with one mother who had the ovum and another mother who carried
 the baby to term. At the time she was reading it, it was a long time ago when surrogacy wasn’t done yet, and my
 mother-inlaw was saying, “Why would they even speculate on this? Why is this in a book from 500 BC or 300 BC?”
A few years later they did exactly that. Answer the question now: Which one has the
 karma of being the mother? There are just so many cases! I could write a book about all the times the West has come
 around to the ideas that they previously dismissed as ridiculous Indian ideas, and now they go, “Oh, actually that’s
 true!”
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Q: Well, the concept of nothingness is from the Indian
 philosophy. So many of the fundamental principles of mathematics came from India.
RC:&nbsp;William James, the psychologist, said
 around 1900, “The nature of the human mind is that it cannot stay on a single thought or a single object for more
 than a second or two.” Meanwhile these meditators in India could just stay there; forget hours or days, they could
 just stay there. That was completely out of the mindset of the Western scientists of the Victorian era.
Q: One thing that amazes me that Babuji said is, “The way
 forward for humanity is Eastern heart and Western mind, together.” It’s not that you need one; you need both.
 Somebody like you has the possibility to live that, right?
RC:&nbsp;That’s my goal. I feel so blessed that I
 was given a rigorous scientific education at a time when quantum theory was known, general relativity, transistors,
 everything that we know about the natural world, and at the same time, the great thinkers of India like Nagarjuna
 and others had been translated.
Before 1980 you could not find a good translation of Nagarjuna, and before 1980 you
 really couldn’t find any presentation on general relativity or quantum theory for lay people. And now you find both
 if you know where to look. Someone has to still show you some of these things, because they are pretty impenetrable
 at a certain superficial level, but if someone leads you through it, you can get it. I teach a one-week symposium on
 this.
Q: You are welcome to do it sometime here.
RC:&nbsp;I’d love to. It would be a blast! Thank
 you very much.
<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Interviewed by ELIZABETH DENLEY</h4>
<hr>

Robert Chilton

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