290 / Tibetan Scholastic Practices

One of my friends at the Buddhist School of Dialectics would sometimes

enter into a possessed state. His voice would change and he would start to
scold his fellow students, accusing them of being slack in their studies, in-
sufficiently respectful of their precepts, and so on. One day, Gen Nyi-ma
happened to be at the school when my friend entered such a state, and he
was called in. Gen-la was well acquainted with this type of phenomenon
and knew immediately what to do: he tied all the fingers of my friend’s
hand and started to squeeze his head. The goal was to literally squeeze out
the spirit who had taken hold of my friend (I guess spirits cannot leave
through the feet) and force it to promise not to come back. Gen-la suc-
ceeded and the cure seemed to work; for the several years I stayed at the
school, my friend was not possessed again.
I never asked Gen Nyi-ma whether he believed that the world was round
or, as stated in the Abhidharma, flat.37 He never talked about the subject,
and my sense is that he was perhaps amenable to the scientific view. Sev-
eral of my teachers were certainly not so flexible. I remember a particularly
painful exchange with Lati Rin-po-che on this topic. Rin-po-che was teach-
ing me Abhidharma in preparation for my Geshe exam. He thought it was
about time to set me straight and started a debate on the shape of the earth,
presenting the kind of arguments I had given my father as a child (e.g., “If
the earth is round, why do those that are under not fall?”). I was horrified
and humiliated (it felt like being back in kindergarten), but Rin-po-che
would not desist and continued his debate. His persistence in turn annoyed
me more. Finally I just could not take it anymore and I stopped the pro-
ceedings, declaring them a complete waste of time. Needless to say, Rin-po-
che was shocked by this total breach of the teacher-student relationship.
A student may be free to disagree but certainly is not the person in charge
of deciding what should be discussed. Gen Nyi-ma would probably have
been less adamant on the subject; he understood that I was coming from
a different world. Perhaps his small but real exposure to modern Chinese
culture as a child and as a member of the Dalai Lama’s party during a visit
to China in 1955 had prepared him for one of the possibilities opened
by science. But such encounters never undermined his confidence in his
worldview.
As a consequence of his worldview, Gen-la felt completely at ease in
tantric practice. He had spent some time in the Tantric Monastery of Lower
Lhasa (rgyud smad) and was an expert in both the theory and practice of
tantra. As the anecdote about dispelling the possessing spirit illustrates,
Gen-la was an accomplished ritualist. Nothing about him of the Protestant
Buddhist uncomfortable with rituals! Though himself an intellectual, he