Phakya Rinpoche’s Incredible Recovery

November 2003 Phakya Rinpoche watches through the window as lightning strikes illuminate the New York sky. “I close my eyes and take a deep breath to try to contain the pain. It lacerates my back, and at regular intervals I have a twitching pain in my right leg, disfigured by advanced gangrene. The bandage cannot contain the unbearable smell of rotting flesh emanating from my wound,” writes a Tibetan lama in his confessional book “Meditation Saved Me.” According to the doctors of the Bellevue clinic, in which he ended up as part of the American program for helping survivors under torture, his life could only be saved by amputation of his leg below the knee. In addition, the body was depleted by pleurisy and bone tuberculosis. Neither antibiotics nor daily curettage had the slightest effect. This condition was the result of torture by the Chinese police, who tortured him for several months in 1999. His crime was that he was a member of the Dalai Lama’s cabal.

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37-year-old Phakya Rinpoche has long been a master of contemplation and yoga of inner energies. For more than twenty years he studied Buddhist texts with the commentaries of many generations of yogis. Note, by the way, that Rinpoche is not a surname. By tradition, all lamas call themselves that. The word means “precious,” and lamas are given this name because they volunteer to be reborn for the benefit of all beings, to teach them how to be free from suffering.

connected with nature

Let’s go back. The story of this man is far from banal. He was born in 1966 in Tibet, the land of snows, and was a descendant of the mythical Kampa horsemen who defeated the Chinese Tang Dynasty in the XNUMXth century. He grew up in the bosom of nature, among horses and herds of yaks. On the pages of his books, we get acquainted with a world where dreams, clouds, earthly and winged animals turn out to be carriers of messages and prophecies addressed to people. In this world, the gods turn into birds to serve as guides. From a very early age, Phakya Rinpoche knew that he needed to listen to the birdsong to know where to go—nothing to do with the emasculated and pragmatic New Age view of Buddhism that Western people have.

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The vocation of a monk was revealed to him in the year of his thirteenth birthday. He fell asleep among the grasses and had a dream. A being made of light was staring at him. It was the Buddha Maitreya — the protector, the deity of love — and he asked to follow him. Does he want? “Yes,” the sleeper replied, waking up immediately with a face wet with tears. “I then vowed to bring my life as a gift to all beings,” he wrote. In a few minutes, the teenager became completely different. He told his grandmother about this vision, who later helped him to follow the path of the Buddha and the great Tibetan saints. This communion was a dangerous business. In occupied Tibet, serving the religion of the ancestors is an act of resistance.

Condemned to exile

For Phakya Rinpoche, going to the USA meant sharing the fate of many lamas. Ever since China conquered Tibet, great teachers have gone into exile to ensure the succession. Most go to India, but many also settle in the USA, in the land of the redskins. Moreover, it seems that in one of their prophecies it was said a long time ago: “When iron birds fly, when iron horses ride through the streets, the teachings of dharma will be expelled from Tibet. Tibetans, like ants, will scatter all over the earth. And the dharma will go to the Land of the Red People.”

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In the US, Phakya Rinpoche had the opportunity to talk to a psychologist. For the first time he spoke about his position as a refugee, about the blows that fell on him, about violence. He was finally able to talk about his pain when he was dehumanized by the executioners. “To cease to be a man, to be reduced to a state of dirty garbage, a dismembered, broken body, humiliated by shameful tortures — how to express all this to beings whose physical and moral integrity has never been ridiculed?” But he does not hold a grudge against his executioners: they have collected so much «bad karma» that they need to be pitied. After all, they had so many victims like him. “The real enemy is always within us,” he says, as a true Buddhist should. “It is hatred, anger, the desire for possession, the desire for revenge.”

On November 16, 2003, after six months of treatment, his condition worsened. Western medicine could not do anything for him. From the medical point of view, the only solution was to amputate the gangrene-ridden leg. However, he did not go for it. This would prevent the circulation of energy throughout the body. Hesitating, he wrote to the Dalai Lama. The answer was not long in coming: “Why do you seek healing outside of yourself? You yourself have healing wisdom, and when you are healed, you will teach the world how to heal.” These words were a revelation to Phakya Rinpoche.

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Guarded by his kind

On December 1, 2003, despite doctors’ warnings, he left Bellevue Hospital and moved into a small apartment in Brooklyn that became his meditation cave. “Just as I used to invoke the protection of the hawk, on this day I invoked the protection of my kind. The spirit of my kind was not slow to manifest, and I noticed a luminous and favorable protective aura. This was the start of a three year meditation retreat. Three years of meditation and yoga exercises to work out the energies of the body — that is, rather, the bodies. Because there are several bodies in this tradition. In the visible physical body there is another, invisible, «conscious and connected with the deepest levels of the spirit.» Meditation is to get in touch with them. The lama also does intense visualization work — he imagines his body as an empty shell, without flesh and bones — and breath work «to expel toxins, exhale them.» This is not only a reflex, in the anatomical sense of the word, but a practice aimed at increasing the circulation of 21 breaths — life forces in Buddhist concepts.

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During the retreat, Phakya Rinpoche carried out a real healing program: yoga, meditation and visualization, as well as prayers, sacrifices, mantra recitation, the use of healing stones. He called to meet with the disease humanoid gods with the head of a horse or buffalo, as well as green Tara, the mother of all people. His food was simple, based on barley flour, cheese and tea. I got up at 5 am, went to bed after midnight. It was austerity, but also the activation of the techniques of the traditional health system, returning to the world of the ancestors. This work brings together three planes of reality: religious, philosophical and the plane of the «inner sciences» — meditation and yoga. It cannot be improvised. You have to be dedicated from a very early age for this to work. At the moment he decided to retire to his meditation cave, the lama had 24 hours of practice behind him.

Ignored by medicine

By 2009, he was able to walk again. In 2013, only an old scar remained from gangrene, the bones were restored. Today, a slightly disappointed lama asks himself: “Why did the same doctors who wanted to amputate my leg not pay attention to my recovery? They saw how my wounds healed, I gradually learned to walk without crutches, but they chose to ignore this progress. Because he contradicted their predictions? Because I turned to spiritual healing potential?”

Other physicians have categorized the whole story as unexplained spontaneous recoveries, because the most sophisticated medical research methods do not allow us to understand how this healing could happen. «Spirit» is not the brain. This self-healing is undeniable, but how is it to be explained? The action of meditation, as Phakya Rinpoche thinks? The power of compassion that the lamas use as a powerful force? By the action of healing spirits and guardian buddhas? Who knows?

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Commentary by psychoanalyst Olivier Douville

Can Phakya Rinpoche’s recovery be explained by natural physiological processes? How do you, a psychoanalyst and a person who met with the lama after his healing, explain it?

I just don’t explain it. This recovery is a challenge for both medicine and psychoanalysis. My first impulse was to delve into the history of miracles recorded by the Church. Never before have we seen bones regenerate like this. Draw? Attractive hypothesis. But after meeting a lama, I prefer to ask myself: “What if it’s true?” He is convinced that meditation saved him. For my part, I cannot vouch for what was the real reason for his recovery. Physician Lionel Coudron, who read the history of the disease, believes that through meditation, Phakya Rinpoche gave the cells of tissues, cartilage and bones the ability to reproduce. He postulates that in every cell of our body the blueprint of our entire body is imprinted. We Westerners, in his opinion, have lost this natural ability to act on our cells. Here is your point of view! Besides, how to prove the healing effect of meditation? For such an experiment, one would have to deprive the patient of any other treatment, and then see how his condition changes. No doctor would take that risk. My hypothesis? The more we forget about our narcissism, the more we develop body memory — perhaps written in the genes.

But in psychoanalysis, can’t physical symptoms and illnesses recede for inexplicable reasons?

Oh sure. Freud at one time spoke of the impulse to recovery. And patients spontaneously introduce themselves into a state of meditation, self-hypnosis. The couch is designed for the same. Psychoanalysis and Buddhism have in common that they refuse to separate the soul from the body. However, we are not talking about «spirit», but rather about psychic energy, about libido or narcissism, which have a healing effect on the body. But we do not know anything about this psychic energy: this is a working hypothesis. Where Buddhism and psychoanalysis are not equal is that psychoanalysis is unable to create a theory of healing or a convincing theory of psychosomatics. And in Buddhist philosophy, a «miraculous» recovery is not something shocking — just because the philosophical and spiritual material for its explanation in the Buddhist paradigm is available.

Phakya Rinpoche is committed to using his story to heal humanity. Can it inspire a psychoanalyst?

I think we can learn a lot from Eastern philosophies in their approach to the body, to the relationship between mind and body. I also think that it is time to stop using this term, “body”: it is wrong to use the same word to designate the biological body, the body of the patient, the body as a source of pleasure, the image of oneself and the corpse. As for the value of Phakya Rinpoche’s testimony, it should be noted that many of its elements elude us, because it is recorded from his words, because we do not speak his language. And also because words like «sympathy» and «I» have different meanings in his culture and in ours. There is nothing sentimental about his sympathy: it is the openness of the universe.

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