A report on Karl Brunnholzl and Stephanie Johnston's visit to the Hermitage
Karl Brunnholzl and Stephanie Johnston visit
Karl Brunnholzl and Stephanie Johnston came to the Hermitage for their long awaited and anticipated visit. They have recently moved to Germany, Karl's home country, from North America and they're starting to get settled there. Although I've known them both for a number of years it was a rare occasion that we could actually spend time getting to know each other better. They also contributed to our series of conversations about the student teacher relationship, the Guru Principle. Over the week we had a lot of conversations about Guru Principle and the role of lamas and the various things that I talk about in the Guru Principle book and we all found the conversations very fruitful and supportive. They paid a visit to Dashon and established a connection with him that we'll be able to take forward, and we were able to visit some of our favourite sacred places and practise in them the way that Khenpo Rinpoche encouraged us to do.
It was an opportunity to really understand what kind of experience Karl and Stephanie have in Dharma terms; I was very surprised at how little I had actually known about them before! They certainly are quite experienced lamas, although they're not called lamas within their sangha; they mainly work with Ponlop Rinpoche in the Nalandabodhi Bodhi Sangha and in their sangha they're given different titles instead of lama - each sangha seems to have its own set of titles. They agreed that there's a tendency for Tibetans to only call Tibetan teachers lamas, whereas actually it's important that that tendency doesn't carry on down the generations as we've obviously got to have western lamas.
As you probably all know, Karl Brunnholzl is a prolific writer, translator and scholar. He writes big tomes on Buddhist texts, and the tradition, with varied scholarly footnotes. At the moment he's translating collections of Doha songs that he also sings - he sang them with us after evening Puja during his stay, accompanied by Steph and his guitar. I hope we will eventually be able to learn from them as they are very touching and inspiring.
Karl was made one of the main four or five western teachers, over 17 years ago, by Ponlop Rinpoche in Nalandabodhi, and he has since taught in Nalandabodhi and the Nitartha Institute, which is associated with Nalandabodhi. He has many, many personal students who go to him for advice on their practice and meditation and he runs many courses; at the moment he's running one online about Yogachara. He gave a course on Yogachara and Chittamatra last summer, and I hope we will be able to access this and discuss it with him.
Steph began in Shambhala with Trungpa Rinpoche himself before becoming a student of the Sakyong. She went through the programme in Shambhala, and then Ngedön School school, before becoming a student of Ponlop Rinpoche. She then became a teacher in both the Ngedön School and the Nitartha Institute. She was the main person instrumental in creating the curriculum for training the practice instructors in Nalandabodhi and she continues to be their main trainer and supervisor. So she's in a position to give us a lot of advice and share with us her experience of how she's developed her own training programme. She's also been one of the main people instrumental in their publishing department, producing, editing and even writing their practice manuals. So she's got many skills to offer! Her early education was in art, art history and curating for museums and she has created programmes for leading museum tours using experiential learning and visual thinking strategies as their basis. So she has something there that she can offer us in terms of Buddhism and art. She's very knowledgeable in various ways, which became evident from our conversations. One of her first specialities is valid cognition, which is a topic we haven't really touched on yet, particularly in our sangha. At present she is creating Buddhist art-based learning experiences as a fresh and applicable way to explore the authentic teachings for new and seasoned practitioners alike.
We were able to tell her about our own training programmes. Pati and Tara joined in all these conversations and explained how we do our training. Steph took notes and is really ready to help us in whatever way she can. In fact, both of them are, so this was a very important connection that we've made with the pair of them. I think if we make that connection strong, I think they would be very happy to also strengthen the connection with our sangha.
Thats it for now,
Love Shenpen