Letter to the Kalapa Council Regarding the Nalanda Translation Committee House

This letter reflects one position of an important conversation that is occurring in the Shambhala community. While it isn’t the view of San Francisco Shambhala, it is published here for the sake of transparency and bringing forth the conversation. There are possible inaccuracies in this letter as well as varying opinions on the subject.

 


 

Dear Kalapa Council,
First, we deeply appreciate your service to the Shambhala mandala, and in particular, your dedication now, in this difficult period.

As we’ve come to learn, Shambhala has pressing debts and is in need of cash. You have announced your intention to solve the problem by mortgaging a house in Halifax, which is the headquarters of the Nalanda Translation Committee (NTC), with its huge research library of Tibetan and English dharma books and files, where an inventory of their publications resides and from where these are shipped to practitioners the world over, and where the translators meet to work. Larry Mermelstein, the director of the Committee, is a rent-paying resident of the house. (The NTC, incidentally, has been self-supporting since its inception, relying solely on donations and the sale of publications.)

The property was gifted to Nalanda Foundation of Canada, the sister organization to Shambhala, 32 years ago by Shambhala’s most generous donor, Martha Bonzi. The Council controls both organizations and plans to transfer the funds from Nalanda (not a church) to Shambhala (a church).

We understand that Martha Bonzi has donated more than $7 million in gifts over 35 years. Her generosity has literally enabled many of Shambhala’s most central institutions to survive and thrive. (These include the Halifax Shambhala Center and Gampo Abbey, as well as the legally independent Naropa University.) She gave the house for the use of the Translation Committee and its use only — for its work translating the dharma, and as its primary asset, supporting future decades of work. She did not make a formal gift restriction out of her trust for the commitment made by Shambhala, and she clearly stated that the house was never to be mortgaged or sold. This intention was made crystal clear at the time of the gift in 1986 and repeated with equal clarity in writing in early 2013 and 2015, when Shambhala first attempted to mortgage the property. To their credit, the leadership at the time honored Martha’s wishes. Whether the asset remains one of real estate or is sold someday, the commitment made to Martha in light of her wishes was that the resource would be solely used for the ongoing work of the NTC.

We learned of Shambhala’s recent mortgage plan last week in a letter about Shambhala’s finances from its finance director, Ryan Watson. The news about the house was in a single sentence at the end of the fourth paragraph, where it was easy to miss its import. There has been no clarity as to the amount that is planned to be borrowed, but it has been rumored that Shambhala needs $500,000 in the very near term, a very significant percentage of the value of the house and one that will cost at least $3,000 per month over 20 years.

This is not only morally wrong but is self-destructive. Shambhala is, unquestionably, ethically bound to abide by the express wishes of the donor. This is deeply counterproductive if the goal is to rebuild trust though a stated interest in transparency. Shambhala will need generous donors to become sustainable. Why would any future donors contribute to an organization that ignores the intentions of the most generous among us?

As disturbing as this violation of trust is, the reason given by the Kalapa Council for choosing to burden the Nalanda Translation house with a large debt rather than looking at other options is extraordinary. The Kalapa Council stated that “real estate assets that are no longer core to our operations will be mortgaged and may need to be sold.” The only named real estate is the NTC headquarters. Proceeds are meant to be used to retire debt and provide a financial cushion for unnamed use in the future. Please consider the profundity of this message to the sangha. This is not a matter of disposing of unimportant real estate but is gutting the 32 year old financial model that ensures NTC’s ongoing ability to work—to translate and produce material at a cost affordable to the sangha—and to train a new generation of translators. The issue is not whether a house in Halifax is “core to our operations.” Rather it is whether the NTC is core, and if it is, a commitment to protect, rather than undermine, its work is what is needed. Your proposed plan from our point of view does not appear to be the product of strategic thinking. That may be difficult to achieve in a rapidly changing environment that includes leadership changes. But that is all the more reason not to undermine the NTC and to come up with a Shambhala-wide way to address the short term financial needs.

Does the wider Shambhala community — newer students, older students, all of us — still need the work of the Nalanda translators? Is it still “core” to the primary mission of Shambhala — the teaching and practice of Shambhala and Buddhist meditation through accessible root texts?

Nalanda translators have, over their 43 years of existence, made it possible for many thousands of us to study and practice the Kagyu and Nyingma teachings and the Shambhala termas and teachings, including seminal texts like the Werma Sadhana — work that was pioneering, elegant, and profound. As Trungpa Rinpoche said (in 1981) of the translators’ work: “We are continually producing a rain of wisdom at this point.”

But has that rain of wisdom dried up? Is the work of translating Tibetan dharma into English finished, completed? Not by a long shot.

According to Larry Mermelstein there is enough work to keep the translators busy for the rest of their lives. What’s left? So much. Many hundreds of pages of Trungpa Rinpoche’s own writings from Tibet, which were gathered over a period of 20 years by his nephew, Karma Senge Rinpoche, who traveled to wherever Trungpa Rinpoche had been, and found over 90 Tibetans who had kept these writings safe, hidden them, treasured them, for more than a half-century. He has collected over 175 texts, more than 600 pages — a significant portion being termas (treasure teachings) and practice liturgies, along with meditation instructions and pithy advice — all written by Trungpa Rinpoche before escaping Tibet when he was 19. (But then, this was a mahasiddha, a man who was writing dharma and discovering termas beginning at the age of 3!) These include profound and advanced teachings on mahamudra and maha ati, as well as his early Shambhala teachings and termas. There is, in addition, a huge collection of the newly discovered writings of Khenpo Gangshar, one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s primary gurus, a mahasiddha in his own right.

In addition, the translators are training younger people, students of the Tibetan language and new members of the Committee, to continue the work of translation into the future. Harry Einhorn and Tillie Perks, both second-generation Shambhalians, are among their newest members. This was how it worked in the time of Padmasambhava and of Marpa, with his perilous travels to India to gather teachings and return to help plant Buddhism in Tibet. And now it has come to America and the West. Trungpa Rinpoche, seen by many as the second Padmasambhava, worked to plant the dharma here, for us and for those who come after us.

These teachings are the Vidyadhara’s great gift. They are the birthright, the heritage of all of us, all Shambhala practitioners. They are, quite literally, our treasures. They are for the future, for people 100, 1,000 years from now. If you think about it, that is what remains — the teachings. That is why Buddhists honor dharma books, wrap them carefully in brocade and put them on their shrines. The teachings are where the dharma indelibly resides. We must not impede and disrespect the work of the translators — and crucially, we must not violate the stated intentions of a donor who realized the crucial importance of the translators’ work, making the Buddhist and Shambhala teachings accessible to us all, and who honored it by giving them their primary asset, a house to keep, to work in, to have as security. The Nalanda Translation headquarters belongs to the Nalanda Translation Committee. It violates integrity, and common sense, to mortgage it to pay debts not of their making. That is not a legality; it is a moral and dharmic imperative.

Respectfully,
Barbara Elizabeth Stewart & Miriam Tarcov