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Home , Mary Farkas, Ram Dass

HE WAR on at least one drug-the psychedelic variety-has been won. In place of the alchemi- Tcals that reigned supreme for a momentarily eternal moment, young would-be mind explorers now toke their way through a fractaled marketplace of pot, coke, weak acid, heroin, cocaine, 'ludes, Ecstasy, speed, crack. Set and setting? The set is the fresh curi- ous wary jumpy insecure brain of a bright young kid- fourteen, twelve, ten, the age keeps dropping-and the setting is the schoolyard, the street comer, the stall in the boys' or girls' room before homeroom. Or maybe (at best?) it's a tribal merge at a thumping, flashing rave or a Grateful Dead concert. Always a buzzing swarm. But still hardly the contemplative gardens or paisley candlelit retreats of the first psychedelic illuminati. The heady halcyon days and nights of psychedelia, which once led so many to Buddhist practice, have been effi- ciently eliminated, reduced to retrofashion. The young now turn on in a world in which the sacred has been trivialized into the recreational. No wonder so many are Psychedelic Solution, Mark McCloud relieved to see as a recovery program: in the morning a half hour of in a halfway house. sort of good news-for some unreformed heads at That practice can be helpful, even lifesaving, to the least. There is something of a psychedelic revival going strung-out is of course good news. But there is another on these days-and more than a few Buddhists are tak- ing part in it. The sacramentals are partly the old famil- Rick Fields's books include How the Swans Came to the Lake iar (LSD), the new (Ecstasy and other designer drugs), (Shambhala Publications), The Code of the Warrior (HarperCollins), and, most recently, Instructions to the Cook and the ancient (plant such as mushrooms, (with Bernard Glassman, Bell Tower). He is currently the editor peyote cactus, and the Amazonian ayahuasca). of Journal. Interestingly, it is the last category, the ancient plants Ecstasy) became fashionable, both among psychothera- used by the oldest indigenous peoples on the earth, pists and in the new youth culture in the rave and that seems to hold the most promise for the future. dance club scene. Ecstasy is not a hallucinogen or There are a number of reasons for this psychedelic , but has best been described as an revival. For one thing, psychedelics have proven to have empathogen: it seems to relax the stranglehold of the a certain staying power. Stamped down countless individual ego and open the way to an unusually high times, abandoned for various reasons, they nevertheless level of intimacy and communication (hence its popu- somehow manage to pop up like mushrooms from one larity with marriage counselors). The general calmness, generation to the serenity, and spaciousness of the experience has led, in next. Timing is some circles, to its being called the "Buddha-drug," If also a part of it. A psychedelics correspond (for some at least) with dynamic back-and- Tibetan or tantric Buddhism, then Ecstasy could be forth relationship seen as the or drug of choice. In between psyche- fact, at least one rumor tells of a serious circle of practi- delics and Eastern tioners who use Ecstasy as a support for their metta has (loving-kindness) practice. existed since the During the seventies and eighties, nineteenth centu- use seems to have been largely discounted in Buddhist

ry. In the fifties communities-as it was in the larger culture-though Buddhist and it was not entirely absent from either arena. It simply Hindu texts went underground. Buddhist groups quite understand- inspired aristocrat- ably were anxious to stay on the right side of the law ic British exiles like and seemed as anxious as most organizations to sepa- the writers Gerald rate themselves from the sixties' drug and anti-war coun- Heard and Aldous tercultures. And individual students were growing older, Huxley to seek an taking on the responsibilities of families and careers. ci experiential illumi- For most students psychedelics were remembered as a >::J

Timothy Leary and sons. A loosely floating post- tribe of Buddhist U w o Richard Alpert () to investigate Eastern texts Deadheads, the Dead Buddhists of America, kept some- 0i w and practices. thing of the old spirit alive. When Jerry Garcia died in ti: ::J o During the eighties the use of MDMA (Adam, 1995, the editor of their 'zine, The Conch Us Times, led a U meditation of Chenrezi, the bodhisattva of compassion. mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call In the middle of the meditation, he instructed everyone 'a gratuitous grace,' not necessary to salvation but to see Jerry as the bodhisattva, "merging with the lights potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if of Buddha-mind in the journey through the ." made available." When Maria, Huxley's wife of more Now, in the pre millennium nineties, we may be than thirty years, lay dying of cancer, he read to her the seeing a generation who have steeped themselves in reminders from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, reducing practice become inspired to take another, more them to their simplest form and repeating them close mature-and more penetrating-look at psychedelics. to her ear: "Let go, let go. Go forward into the light. Let yourself be carried into the light." He continued URING THE SOPORIFIC FIFTIES, access to both after she had stopped breathing, "tears streaming down psychedelics and Buddhism was limited to a his face, with his quiet voice not breaking," his son D small but influential elite. A British psychia- Matthew remembered. trist working in Canada, Dr. Humphrey Osmond, A few years earlier, in july 1953, the ex-banker eth- enlisted as a subject for his experiments nomycologist Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina, with mescaline in Los Angeles one afternoon in the had reached the Mazatec village of Huautla de Jimenez, middle of May 1953. Huxley was well prepared. He where they discovered the mush- and his fellow expatriate, the writer Gerald Heard, had rooms (teonanacatl, the "flesh of the gods") and man- studied Vedanta and practiced disciplined meditation aged to take part in an all-night vclada. Wasson's

for some years, and Huxley had ransacked the world's evenhanded and respectful article on his adventures mystical writings for his anthology The Perennial was published by Life in 1957. The article was read by Philosophy. Sitting in his garden with Dr. Osmond, he a Berkeley , Frank Barron, who had tried experienced the grace and transfiguration he had read some of the mushrooms, and passed on his enthusiasm about. Remembering a from one ofD. T Suzuki's to another academic psychologist and old friend, essays, "What is the -Body of the Buddha?" he Timothy Leary. Before taking up his new job at found the answer: "The hedge at the bottom of the gar- Harvard's Center for the Study of Personality, Leary den." What had previously seemed "only a vaguely spent the summer in Cuernavaca. Naturally, he tried pregnant piece of nonsense" was now clear as day. "Of the mushrooms. "The journey lasted a little over four course, the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge hours," he wrote. "Like almost everyone who had the at the bottom of the garden," he reported in The Doors veil drawn, I came back a changed man." of . "At the same time, and no less obviously, Leary was now more interested in transcendence it was these flowers, it was anything that I-or rather than personality assessment. As head of the Harvard the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my Psychedelic Drug Research Project, he ran a session for throttling embrace-cared to look at." Of course MlT Professor , who made the experience Huxley still had his famous wits about him. "I am not available as a laboratory experiment for his seminars in so foolish as to equate what happens under the influ- mysticism. Next, in a now-famous double-blind experi- ence of mescaline ... with the realization of the end ment, on Good Friday in a chapel of the and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment," University Cathedral, divinity students were given he reassured his reader. "AllI am suggesting is that the either psilocybin or a placebo. To no one's surprise, only those who had taken the psychedelic sacrament sented a double spread of the Center version com- reported what appeared to be bona fide mystical experi- plete with Chinese characters, but also with a naked ences. Time published a favorable report, with reassur- goddess, drawn in the best Avalon Ballroom psychedel- ing quotes from Professor Walter Clark of Andover- ic. While the beats had dressed in existential black and Smith, and other leading theologians. "We expected blue, this new generation wore plumage and beads and that every priest, minister, rabbi, theologian, philoso- feathers worthy of the most flaming tropical birds. If pher, scholar and just plain God-seeking man, woman the previous generation had been gloomy atheists and child in the country would follow up the implica- attracted to Zen by iconoclastic directives, i.e.-"If you tions of the study," wrote Leary. Instead,"a tide of dis- meet the Buddha, kill him!"-these new kids were, as approval greeted the good news." What followed was Gary Snyder told Dom Aelred Graham in an interview much worse. As use spread and the less expensive and in Kyoto, "unabashedly religious. They love to talk much more powerful LSD became the drug of choice, about God or Christ or Vishnu or Shiva." all heaven and hell broke loose. Huxley, guest lecturing Snyder himself had gotten a firsthand look at the at MIl, advised discretion, keeping the drugs inside a counterculture when he returned from Japan for a short small, charmed circle-a kind of aristocratic mystery visit in 1966. He was just in time for the first Be-In at school. Leary put forth a plan for training and certifying Golden Gate Park, where he was joined by a number of guides. But it was all too much, too fast, and too late. A friends from the early days. was there, generation gap had been blown open. The old were as were and Michael McClure. appalled, the young enthralled. "Some students quit Kerouac was conspicuous by his brooding absence. He school and pilgrimaged easrward to study yoga on the wanted nothing to do with it all. (When Leary had Ganges," Leary wrote in Flashbachs, "not necessarily a offered him LSD back in Ginsberg'S apartment in New bad development from our point of view but under- York he had objected: "Walking on water wasn't built in standably upsetting to parents, who did not send their a day.") These new horrified him. When a kids to Harvard to become buddhas." bunch of kids showed up at his mother's house in Leary and Alpert left Harvard in 1963. Now they Northampton, Long Island, with jackets that said were but one wave, albeit a very visible and noisy one, "Dharma Bums" across the back, he slammed the door in a counterculture transformation that had swept in their faces. across America and crested in San Francisco. The cen- But now, at the Be-In, with the sun shining ter of activity was Haight-Ashbury, which was just a through a deep blue sky and thousands of people at short stroll from a Soto Zen mission, Sokoji, and its ease in all their finery on the meadow, Snyder read his American offshoot, the San Francisco Zen Center. But poems and Ginsberg chanted the Heart to clear the spiritual atmosphere was more than Zen-it was the meadows of lurking demons. Even Shunryu Suzuki eclectic, visionary, polytheistic, ecstatic and defiantly Roshi of the burgeoning San Francisco Zen Center devotional. The newspaper of the new vision, The San appeared briefly, holding a single flower. Francisco Oracle, exploded in a vast rainbow that Also present on the stage that afternoon were encompassed everything in one great Whitmanesque Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, the two ex-Harvard blaze of light and camaraderie. North American professors, who by now were prophetic Indians, Shiva, Kali, Buddha, tarot, , Saint psychedelic pied pipers. Whatever else LSD became in Francis, Zen, and all combined to sell fifty thou- time, at that moment it was the messenger that led a sand copies on streets that were suddenly teeming with fair number of people into the dazzling land of their people.When the Oracle printed the Heart Sutra, it pre- own mind. What had begun as the private discovery of a few intellectuals and experimenters had spread in a flash, and for a split second of history it was as if the veil had been rent and all the archetypes of the unconscious now sprang forth. There were those who claimed that psyche- delics had changed the rules of the game, and that the mystic visions once enjoyed only by saints could now be had by anyone. In any case, it was obvious to the university researchers at Harvard, who had searched the scientific lit- erature in vain, that the scriptures of Buddhism (and ) contained descriptions that matched what they had seen and felt. So Timothy Leary recast the verses of the Tao Te Ching in a book called Psychedelic Prayers, and i.n 1962 Timothy Leary, , and Richard Alpert adapted the Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, retranslated from Evans-Wentz's "Anglo-Buddhist to American Psychedelic" in The Psychedelic Experience:A

Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Because Kwan Vin in Kansas City, Arthur Okamura, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1994 the book was apparently meant to acquaint a dying per- son with the liberation of the Clear Light of Reality and passed peacefully into the Clear Light of Reality. then guide him or her through the peaceful and wrath- Before long, a number of the psychedelic luminar- ful deities of the bardo it was fairly easy to recast it as a ies made their way to .In 1966, Ralph Metzner guide in which physical death was reconfigured as the introduced Timothy Leary to the German-born death of the ego during a psychedelic trip. The Anagarika Govinda, who lived in Evans-Wentz's old Psychedelic Experience went through sixteen editions, cottage in the Himalayan village of Nanital. "The lama and was translated into seven languages. had been most impressed to learn that The Psychedelic One of the book's most interested readers was Experience contained a dedication to him," Leary wrote Aldous Huxley, who called Leary from Los Angeles, in Flashbachs. Govinda had requested an LSD session, where Huxley was now dying of cancer. When Leary which Metzner provided. For the first time, after thirty flew out to see him, Huxley asked him to guide him years of meditation, the lama had experienced the -c a: through the bardos. Leary suggested that it would be Bardo Thodal in its living, sweating reality According to :::) :2 « better if Huxley'S second wife, Laura, guided the ses- Leary, Govinda told him that "many of the guardians of a'" a: sions. "No, 1 don't want to put any more emotional the old philosophic traditions had realized that the evo- ~ lr pressure on her," Huxley replied. "1 plan to die during lution of the human race had depended upon a restora- « >- the trip, after all." In the end, Laura did give him the tion of unity between the outer science advanced by U) W f- a: sacrament (LSD) and read him the instructions from the West and the inner yoga advanced by the East." :::) a o the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And so Aldous Huxley The teachings of , Gurdjieff, , Krishnamurti, and Evans-Wentz's translation of the Of course, the voyage was not always necessary. Tibetan Booh of the Dead had all been part of this plan. In his essay "Passage to More than India," Gary "You," the lama told Leary, "are the predictable result Snyder wrote, "Those who do not have the time or of a strategy that has been unfolding for over fifty years. money to go to India or Japan, but who think a great You have done exactly what the philosophers wanted deal about the wisdom traditions, have remarkable done." Presumably referring to Gerald Heard and results when they take LSD. The Bhagavad Gita, the Huxley, he said, "You were prepared discreetly by sever- Hindu Mythologies, the Serpent Power, the Lanhavatara al Englishmen who were themselves agents of this Sutra, the Upanishads, the Hevajra Tantra, the process. You have been an unwitting tool of the great Mahanirvana Tantra-to name a few texts-become, transformation of our age." they say, finally clear to them. They often feel that Ginsberg arrived in India that same year. Lately his they must radically reorganize their lives to harmonize psychedelic visions had become frightening, and he with such insights." At times, as Snyder noted, the was wondering if he ought to continue. In Kalimpong psychedelic experience led straight to meditation. "In he visited Dudjom , the great -scholar several American cities," he wrote, "traditional medi- who was head of the Nyingma (Ancient Ones) . tation halls of both Rinzai and Soto are flourishing. "I have these terrible visions, what should I do?" he Many of the newcomers turned to traditional medita- asked. Dudjom Rinpoche sucked air through his tion after initial acid experience. The two types of mouth, a traditional Tibetan sign of sympathy, and said, experience seem to inform each other." "If you see anything horrible, don't cling to it; if you It was impossible for any roshi to ignore the ques- see anything beautiful, don't cling to it." tion of LSD and its relationship to Buddhism. Koun Leary's partner, Richard Alpert (now known as Yamada Roshi, Yasutani Roshi's chief disciple in Japan, Ram Dass), reached India in 1967, "hoping to find was said to have tried it only to report, "This isn't form someone who might understand more about these sub- is the same as emptiness; this is emptiness is the same stances than we did in the West." When he met his as form." If Suzuki Roshi said (as Gary Snyder told Dom guru, , Ram Dass gave him a hefty Aelred Graham) that "people who have started to come dose of nine hundred micrograms. "My reaction was one to the zendo from LSD experiences have shown an abil- of shock mixed with the fascination of a social scientist, ity to get into good very rapidly," he also said in eager to see what would happen," Ram Dass wrote. New York (as Harold Talbott, Graham's secretary, told "He allowed me to stay for an hour-and nothing Snyder) "that the LSD experience was entirely distinct happened. Nothing whatsoever. He just laughed at me." from Zen." In any case, it seemed that in practice Another time the old man swallowed a mind-bog- Suzuki-roshi mostly ignored it. When Mary Farkas of gling twelve hundred micrograms. "And then he the First Zen Institute asked him what he thought of asked, 'Have you got anything stronger?' I didn't. the "Zen-drug tie-up we kept hearing so much of," she Then he said, 'These medicines were used in Kulu gathered from his reply "that students who had been Valley long ago. But have lost that knowledge. on drugs gradually gave them up and that highly struc- They were used with fasting. Nobody knows how to tured and supervised activities left little opportunity take them now. To take them with no effect, your and lessened inclination." mind must be firmly fixed on God. Others would be But not everyone was so tolerant. In New York a afraid to take. Many saints would not take this.' And student walked into the zendo on acid, sat on his zafu he left it at that." (From Miracle of Love, Stories about until he felt enlightened enough to get up off his cush- Neem Kerch Baba, by Ram Dass.) ion in the middle of zazen, then knelt in front of the 1. D.T. Suzuki, Janis Joplin, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche 2. , Allen Ginsberg 3. Aldous Huxley, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Jack Kerouac 4. Gary Snyder, Grace Slick, Robert Aitken Roshi, Jerry Garcia teacher, Eido Roshi, rang the bell, and walked off non- to begin with, that everybody must speak for himself chalantly into the small rock garden in back of the since so much depended on the "mental state of the zendo. Eido Roshi followed, and the two stood locked person taking the chemical and circumstances under eyeball to eyeball, until the teacher asked,"Yes, but is it which the experiment is conducted." In Watts's case, real?" and the student, who seemed to have held his these had been benign, and LSD had given him "an own till then, fled.After that, there was a rule that no experience both like and unlike what I understood as one could sit zazen who used LSD in or out of the zendo. the flavor of Zen." His mind had slowed, there were Others in the Zen world were equally concemed. In subtle changes in sense perception, and most impor- japan, D. T Suzuki wrote an essay as part of a sympo- tantly, "the thinker" had become confounded so that it sium on "Buddhism and Drugs" for The Eastern Buddhist, realized "that all so-called opposites go together in in which he wamed that the popularity of LSD "has somewhat the same way as the [\'10 sides of a Single reached a point where university professors organize coin." This in turn had led to an experience of what the groups of mystical drug takers with the intention of Japanese Buddhists calledjiji-mu-ge, the principle of forming an intentional society of those who seek 'inter- universal interpenetration. nal freedom.' ... All this sounds dreamy indeed," wrote But if one were not trained in yoga or Zen, wamed D. I Suzuki,"yet they are so serious in their intention, Watts, this insight might lead one to believe either that that Zen people cannot simply ignore their movements." "you are the helpless victim of everything that happens If Dr. Suzuki sounded the alarm, the Americans to you," or that, like God, you are "personally responsi-

:If YOll see anytb·lUg bomiblecd on't.clit Clng to It; . 1if YOll see anyt ill were more moderate in their reactions. Ray jordan, a ble for everything that happened." To go beyond this former student of yogen Senzaki's and then an assis- impasse, one needed either "an attitude of profound tant professor of psychology, had written i.n Psychologia faith or letting-go to you-know-not-what." In that case, that "LSD might be a useful aid both to the realization "the rest of the experience is total delight ... what, in of prajna [wisdom], and to the development of medita- Buddhist terms, would be called an experience of world tional practice," but a sesshin with Yasutani-roshi had as dharmadhatu, of all things and events, however since convinced him that he had been mistaken.The splendid or deplorable from relative points of view, as sesshin had "included a moment which the Roshi iden- aspects of symphonic harmony, which, in its totality, is tified as kensho," and jordan was now able to testify that gorgeous beyond belief." "even the deepest and most powerful realizations asso- And yet, the most interesting part of the experi- ciated with LSD were weak and dim compared to the ence for Watts was not this ecstatic and sublime state, reality and clarity of sesshin events." jordan admitted but the moment of return to the ordinary state of that "in a small number of cases psychedelic experi- mind. There "in the twinkling of an eye" lay the realiza- ences may have revealed to persons the everyday pre- tion "that so-called everyday or ordinary consciousness senmess of the Pure Buddha Land [but] from that is the supreme form of awakening, of Buddha's anut- point on the psychedelics are of no value whatsoever -samyak-sambodhi. " But this realization, remem- insofar as the Way is concemed. Without relying on bered clearly enough, soon faded. "It is thus," anything one must walk step by step, moment by concluded Watts, "that many of us who have experi- moment in the daily reality of the Pure Land." mented with psychedelic chemicals have left them Alan 'vVattswas more sympathetic. He pointed out, behind, like the raft which you used to cross a river, and have found growing interest and even pleasure in where you could get your head together," and a regular the simplest practice of zazen, which we perform like zazen schedule was begun. But the turnover was enor- idiots, without any special purpose." mous. "The thing that created this marvelous spirit also It was left to Robert Aitken to describe the destroyed it," Aitken says now, "and that was the new psychedelic-influenced generation in detail. The dope." The regular use of marijuana, Aitken had early members of Koko-an Zendo, Aitken remembers, observed, "destroyed the sense of proportion," while were former Theosophists. The turning point had come LSD, as he had written in his essay, seemed to "shatter in 1963 or 1964 "when utter strangers would come much of the personality structure, and the impulse of into the dojo, bow at the entrance, seat themselves and the moment assumed paramount importance." sit like stones through the first period, and then at hin- It was, finally, the "human problem of distraction" hin [walking meditation] time they would get up and that Aitken found most crucial. "The new gypsies," he fall down." Aitken couldn't figure it out-until he later discovered that word had gone out that the Koko-an Zendo was a good place for tripping. In 1967 the Aitkens bought a house on the island of in anticipation of Robert's

retirement from the East-West Center at the University of . The long-haired young had begun to flock to Maui by then, and many of them had rented rooms in the Aitken's house. Those from "the yogic end Computer-twirled Kuan Yin of the counterculture," he wrote in The Eastern Buddhist, "had a consuming interest in illuminative reli- found, "blow like leaves in the wind, now in gion, a sense of wholeness and essence, a love of Mendocino, now at San Francisco, then all the way to nature, a devotion to poverty and asceticism, a sensitiv- Maui, then back to the mainland, always with a con- ity to one another, and a desire to 'get it on,' that is, to vincing reason that may be no more than a faint interior practice rather than simply to talk." or exterior impulse." Zazen was a natural corrective to Many of these were interested in zazen, and the this, and the Maui Zendo began to develop more and Aitkens decided to establish a branch of Koko-an on more in the direction of a training center. Maui. In its first stages, Maui Zendo served "as a kind of mission to the psychedelic Bohemia." "Virtually all If the sixties was the high point of the Zen genera- the young people who knock on our front door have tion, the seventies belonged to the Tibetans. The proxi- tried LSD, mescaline, or psilocybin," he wrote-a situa- mate cause, of course, was the Tibetan diaspora. But tion that he thought true for the San Francisco Zen the hallucinogenic aspect of the psychedelic experience Center as well as other groups across the country. itself was certainly a contributing factor. The visual The Maui Zen do soon became known as "a place pyrotechnics of psychedelia made a close fit with the colorful flamboyance of the radiant gods and goddesses about such things, which many of his students-myself and fiery deities of Tibetan art. The putative correspon- included-asked him about. Officially, of course, all dence was further strengthened by seeming similarities illegal drugs were prohibited. But privately Trungpa between the visionary experience of the most popular Rinpoche had, as he told me (and here I paraphrase Tibetan text of the sixties, the Bardo Thodal or Tibetan loosely from faulty memory), a lot of sympathy for stu- Book of the Dead, and the psychedelic experience. These dents who had taken LSD. He even volunteered that elements of psychedelia had their part to play in the we might take it together some time in the future-an increasing popularity of . But as most opportunity or challenge that I never got to take him would-be practitioners soon discovered, the first wave up on, to both my regret and relief. The suggestion was of were more interested in students who were both exhilarating and scary.His style and skill, after all, willing and able to engage in a series of demanding was in cutting through trips of spiritual materialism practices. The point was not to have visions, but to rather than guiding them. visualize. This is hardly surprising. More than most spiritual Another point of divergence was that many people paths, Buddhism tends not to be very impressed by had hoped that meditation and yoga would provide the "experiences," be they spiritual or psychedelic. And "permanent high" lacking in psychedelics. But as more Trungpa Rinpoche, for all his outwardly wild noncon- people actually threw themselves into the practice, it ventional behavior, was a Tibetan mastiff when it came turned out that practice was not really about getting to practice: your ass was on the line, which meant on high at all. In Buddhism, at least, the instructions the cushion. Still, at least in the "early days" of the sev-

LSD was alDLLULki ..-l ..r « sllper-samsara," and lDasmllC° b as lt° ~l,oir seemed to be to not cling to any experience, high or enties, his was wilder and more open than low. A fragment from a Gary Snyder poem springs to many. The point, it seemed, was not to avoid samsara mind: "Experience, that drug .... " but to get into it directly, as long as you returned to the With the advent of actual practice came Buddhist cushion next morning, hungover or fried. As he said in critique of the psychedelic experience. Some teachers one of his few public statements about it, LSD was a slotted drugs into the mind-intoxicant category of the kind of "super-samsara," and inasmuch as it height- precepts. This was not really convincing for many, how- ened certain samsaric tendencies it could be a useful ever, because whatever psychedelics might be, anyone method. who had taken them knew that "intoxicating" was a About marijuana he was less tolerant.The main limited, reductionistic description, at best. And more problem, he once told me, was that marijuana tend- often than not, the Asian teachers making such pro- ed to "mimic meditation." This take led to a dra- nouncements had no actual experience of psychedelics. matic confrontation with a group of his earliest The few teachers who did have such experience, students. In the early seventies a tribe of hippies, however, were in a uniquely privileged position to com- known as the Pygmies, became students and were pare the two experiences. The most sympathetic of the first to colonize the undeveloped land that has these was Trungpa Rinpoche, who had tested and tast- since become known as Rocky Mountain Dharma ed the splendors of Western civilization in England. He Center. They cobbled together an odd assortment of was one of the few Buddhist teachers one could talk to living quarters-yurts, one-rooms, A-frames, a six- sided cabin. "At UCH WAS THE night the main powerful entertainment tend- Santidrug drift. ed to be kicking As always, however, back, pouring a beer, there were counter- smoking ajoint," currents. During the reported Barbara seventies, the eight- Stewart about that ies, and up to the time in The present, a small num- Vajradhatu Sun ber of committed (August/September Buddhist practition- 1991), "but a meet- ers have used the ing ensued, a power- sacrament in the con- ful and violent clash text of formal prac- that would eventual- tice. This was ly mean the begin- necessarily a secret ning of the end of use, harking back to the Pygmies' private the earliest tantric cir-

commune .... LSD blotter paper cles in India, where ill certain samsaric tendencies it cOll~be a llsefu] method.

Smoking marijuana, Rinpoche said, was lying to unlawful and taboo substances such as meat and wine themselves, indulging in self-deception. They were transformed into sacraments. This group was nat- should burn both, marijuana and self-deception .... urally self-selecting, composed mostly of practitioners The Pygmies were taken aback, angry and confused. experienced in both modalities, who found that, han- But only one person-call him Mike-fought back. dled properly, psychedelics can be a useful skillful Jim Lowry remembers this scene .... 'Mike hit means. If the practitioner has the balance and moves to Rinpoche and Rinpoche hit Mike. It was violent, it surf the psychedelic waves, the argument went, then was a huge eruption. Rinpoche threw a flower pot the experience can be useful in one's sadhana (formal ... he missed Mike. Maggie screamed, 'Stop!' .... practice). Myron]. Stolaroff, active in psychedelic Rinpoche built a fire in the fire-place. 'Destroy self- research since 1960, is one of these Buddhist practi- deception,' he was saying .... It was tense but tioners. "For myself," he writes in a recent issue of calm .... Everyone went and got dope and threw it , "I found training in Tibetan Buddhist medita- in the fire. We were kind of chanting: 'Destroy self- tion a potent adjunct to psychedelic exploration. In deception, destroy self-deception.' ... The first learning to hold my mind empty, I became aware that dathun [month-long group meditation] was a turn- other levels of reality would more readily manifest. It ing point, confirming the obvious, that this land was only in absolute stillness ... that many subtle but was to be a meditation center and not an Eden-like extremely valuable nuances of reality appeared. While I Pygmy crafts commune." achieved this to some extent in ordinary practice, I found this effect to be greatly amplified while under the compelling evidence that the mysterious soma of th influence of a psychedelic substance.This in turn Vedic hymns was, in fact, an infusion made from the intensified my daily practice." psychedelic mushroom amanita muscaria, or fly-agaric Such a claim will be outrageous to many-proba- the sacramental basis for a shamanistic ur-religion, bly most-Buddhist practitioners. After all, the use of which he traced back to the late Ice Age in Sibypa: any intoxicants is proscribed by the precepts. And Wasson had an antipathy to hippies and "Timo~h~~ while Saivite Hindu sadhus smoke ganja, and Leary and his ilk," and so was uncomfortable wi~ 't~e Christians drink wine, and Sufis (some at least) have term "psychedelic." He suggested, instead, entheog~ been known to smoke hashish, Buddhists seem to have "god generated within," for the sacred plants that he' been a decidedly sober if not straight, square group. It's felt lay behind the mysteries of the ancients. " true that green tea, a powerful stimulant, is connected Wasson's line of research exemplifies an ethno- '. with , and is used by Zen monks as a botanical school of psychedelic research that was con- stimulant to ward off sleep during meditation. And temporaneous with-and obscured by-the sensation- alcohol also has a small but enduring place in Buddhist alistic and hysterical LSD furor of the sixties. But practice-Zen masters have exhibited a fondness for during the nineties this lineage of ethnobotany has con- sake-and liquor is used ceremonially in tantric feasts, tinued to be enriched by gifted academic botanists, while chang, a potent Tibetan barley-beer, is consumed such as Schultes at Harvard, and gifted amateurs like by monks and lay practitioners in tantric ceremonies Wasson. The most interesting of these post-Wassonites, (as well as for fun) throughout the Himalayas. for our purpose at least, is one SCOtt Hajicek- But what about psychedelics? Is it really the case Dobberstein, who recently published a fascinating that Buddhism, the one "major world religion" without paper, "Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: a personal creator God, is lacking in a mind-altering or psychedelic mushrooms in Buddhist tradition," in the mind-opening sacrament? And even if it lacks such a Journal oj Ethnopharmacology. Hajicek-Dobberstein sacrament today, has it always been sot Certain images argues that the Vedic soma cult-or something very in suggest that this has not always been similar to it-survived among the tantric Buddhist sid- the case. The most glaring example is the existence of dhas who lived in India from the eighth to the tenth am rita, a drink or substance that is said to confer death- century CE., and whose biographies are recounted in a lessness or liberation. If this amrita is not an actual twelfth-century Tibetan text, The Legends of the Eighty- mind-altering substance or plant-what we would so jour Mahasiddhas. crudely call a "drug"-is it "merely" a symbol? But The most compelling evidence is found in the even if it's a symbol, that still leaves the question: a story of the siddha Karnaripa. His guru, , symbol of what? instructed him to demonstrate his austerity by collect- This question leads back to one of the greatest ing only as much food for alms as he could balance on explorer-researcher-theorists of psychedelic lore: ama- the head of a needle. Karnaripa returned with a large teur ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson, who introduced pancake balanced on the tip of a needle-a symbol, the world to the magic psilocybin mushrooms of suggests Hajicek-Dobberstein, of the amanita muscaria. indigenous Mexico. When Wasson extended his explo- More symbols are suggested, but the most convincing ration to other cultures, most notably India, he found evidence is an exchange in which Nagarjuna says, "We Prajnaparamita, the goddess of transcendental wisdom need to eat the alchemical medicine." Karnaripa does Zen ritual, the spontaneous song-prayer of the tantric so, and then spreads his spittle on a dead tree-which doha tradition, and the compassion of the bodhisattva. I bursts in blossom-and then urinates in a pot. This remember one night in a teepee in northern Montana, behavior is taken as a sign of realization by Kamaripa's the clear mind of peyote glowing in the fire before the teacher. For Hajicek-Dobberstein, it is a "marker" of the crescent-moon sand altar, the thump-thump-thump of presence of amanita-soma because drinking the urine of water drum and gourd rattles keeping time with the a shaman who has consumed amanita intensifies the ancient peyote songs-and it was clear as the dawning potency of the mushroom and is a well-known practice light that something close to this went on way back, pos- among Siberians. sibly to the dawn of our human consciousness. The possible use of amanita (or other mushrooms And why not into the future as well? We have or plants) by siddhas also offers a possible solution to much to learn from our native shamans. Both the two thorny Tibetan etymological puzzles. The Tibetan Native American Church and the Brazilian ayahuasca name for cannabis, So.Ma.Ra.Dza, from the churches have successfully grafted an ancient soma-raja, or "king of soma" can now be read as a lin- entheogenic practice onto Christianity. There is nothing guistic trace of a long-forgotten tradition. The second to prevent this from happening with Buddhism as well. puzzle involves the Tibetan translation of amnta (death- Indeed, Buddhism has demonstrated a genius for less) as bDud.rTsi. The word rTsi is "drink, juice," but adapting-or mutating, in Professor Robert Thurman's bDud means "demon." How did the deathless drink of phrase-to a wide range of cultures. In Tibet, this amnta become "demon-juice" in Tibetan? In an unpub- included a shamanistic culture. Whether or not the lished paper, another amateur ethnobotanist, one K. ancient siddhas used mushrooms or other alchemical Tendzin Dorje, retells the story ofVajrapani, who recov- substances, there is no reason why an ecologically ers the amrita that had been stolen by the demon informed American Buddhism cannot likewise draw Rahu. "Demon juice" may therefore refer to the amnta from its own shamanistic earth-wisdom. Sacred plant stolen by the demon Rahu. (I am indebted to Dr. sacraments could be offered as amnta in the context of Richard Kohn for this suggestion.) a tantric feast, for the development of compassion and Such speculative ethnobotanical Tibetan scholar- wisdom in our ravaged world. At least for the tantric ship does not occur in a vacuum. It reflects the ethno- lineages of Buddhism there is no limit to the skillful botanical bent of the current psychedelic revival. In means available to a bodhisattva, which includes many place of the "chemical" intensities of acid, contem- teachings on transforming poison into nectar. As porary psychedelic explorers prefer the "organic" unlikely as it may seem, this devil juice may be just the psychedelics or, to use Wasson's preferred word, antidote for the out-of-control materialism that is rav- "entheogens." These include the psilocybin mush- aging our planet. rooms first rediscovered by Wasson, the peyote used One thing at least seems certain. Whatever the by the Huichols of Mexico and the Native American ancient or recent past history of psychedelic Church, and the ayahuasca used by Amazonian entheogens and Buddhism may be, the story is hardly shamans and ayahuasca circles and churches. All of over. As Hajicek-Dobberstetn says, "Some contempo- these plants have co-existed for millennia with human rary non-orthodox Buddhist 'alchemists' find prece- beings, who have developed intricate rituals and beauti- dents in Mahasiddhas Nagarjuna and Aryadeva, who ful ceremonies to use sacred plants safely and wisely. agreed, 'We need to eat the alchemical medicine. '... The all-night Native American Church ceremony, for Orthodox scholars may object but they can no longer example, combines the discipline and of a Just say No. '" ,