Jumping Over Monks on a BMX - Introduction
In the cold winter of 1964, two Tibetan high Lamas, Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche arrived in Dover via boat from exile in India on a speculative mission to find a site for an inaugural Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in the UK. After being recommended Scotland, due to its perceived geographic similarities with Tibet, they set off by car for a proposed site they had been offered on the outskirts of a small village in the Scottish Borders. A Buddhist commune of sorts had already been established in there but were, shall we say, in need of guidance…Short of arriving, their car broke down in the pitch black, bitter cold valleys just South of their proposed destination in the tiny farming village of Eskdalemuir. Legend has it that they both turned to each other in the back of the stranded vehicle and decided they had been led to this starting point by a higher reckoning and that this was the site upon which they would build the first Buddhist Temple in the Western world.
Twenty years later, in the equally bitter winter of 1984 my parents decided to move from the relative comfort of our Victorian terraced house in suburban Edinburgh to a half-derelict Steading in Eskdalemuir. Exiled from the Church of Scientology in the early-Eighties as a result of a run-in with the Sea Org Centre in East Grinstead which culminated in my older brother appearing in a Daily Mirror expose, my folks had initially sought a new beginning with a breakaway faction of Scientologists in Aberdeenshire. Led by the gregarious Robin Scott this group wanted to concentrate on the therapeutic element of Scientology, not the hard financial targets that had creeped in of late. Things had quickly got ahead of themselves when an over-eager Scott and several others flew to Belgium with a fraudulent plan and stole some secret files from the Church’s headquarters. Their audaciousness led eventually to prosecution and imprisonment and, on a lesser scale the end of the new branch of the Church of Scientology. This bizarre and media friendly chain of events somehow led to my parents selling our large Edinburgh house to former Scientologists and hastily moving South to Eskdalemuir in the middle of winter.
It was to fall to minus twenty that first night as the removal lorry bounced, slid and veered up the 3 mile farm track from the arse end of nowhere to our new abode. At the time, aged seven and looking sleepily out of the window as the rolling hills, cattle grids and endless pine forests stretched out, I remained blissfully unaware that somewhere within that rural vortex lay the almost fully formed Kaygu Samye Ling Tibetian Centre. An enormous but only half-built, breeze block and gold leaf Buddhist temple around which a beautifully chaotic, semi-religious community had grown from the seeds sown in the back of a broken down car. Although Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had since left for America Akong Rinpoche had taken his fledgling Buddhist community from a gaggle of hippies in a farmhouse to a near complete monastery with refuge centre, temple, accommodation block, shop, café, farm, gardens and a community of well over 250 people.
Over the years it had become a powerful people magnet for delusional hippies, burnt out ravers, drug addled krusties, sexually perverse whack jobs, out-and-out nutters and of course Buddhists from all over the World. Most had come seeking refuge in various forms both spiritually and physically. Some however were just plainly on the run from the law, drug dealers or carrying with them their own demons and addictions. They all sought the pursuit of a higher state of consciousness, longing for an escape from Samsara amongst the stark isolation of the Scottish Borders. With them they brought more baggage than Heathrow Airport and probably more contraband than their customs too could handle.
These cultural Conquistadors also inadvertently carried with them the undercurrents of society that would otherwise have never shaken the pillars of this previously sleepy backwater hamlet. An exposure that proved at times exhilarating, occasionally scary, often hilarious and brought many a life altering experience to my formulative years, as my mind was blown and my horizons permanently expanded.
But let’s take it back a bit. Arriving in Eskdalemuir from Edinburgh was a culture shock in itself regardless of a religious fantasy temple being on the doorstep or not. I had moved from a city primary school of over 300 pupils and 40 classrooms to a single roomed school of 14 pupils and one grumpy teacher. Instead of walking with my mates to school I now got in a draughty transit van with 5 other strange looking kids down ‘the track’. My sister and I were quickly added to the rota for opening the farmer’s cattle gate and more often than not we would be sharing this excuse of a school bus with bales of hay, tractor gear boxes and/or recently hunted fish or deer. Having become accustomed to having a well stocked corner shop on my way home from school the local village shop in my new locale was something of a comedown. Out of date crisps, faded Ziggy Stardust puffy stickers, flat bottles of Barrs Kola and mouldy cheese were all hawked from the cramped front hall of a small farm cottage, with a carrier bag full of unfriendliness free with every purchase. All part of the wonder of country living. Or so I was told.
Despite this, there was a sense of something exciting and edgy seeping through this place, a hint of something dangerous, a bit of wild living beyond the farms in amongst the caravans, rented cottages and rough built wooden shacks of the Buddhist Centre. Something in the way these people spoke and looked. They had funny names, strange accents, tattoos, hippy clothes, drove dangerously illegal cars and smoked funny smelling cigarettes. They spoke of “gear” of “doing bird” and of travelling to India and of communes in Spain and squats in South London. They brought stories of massive raves outside Manchester, of escaping police raids in Bristol and violent clashes with fascists in Rome. Looking like they carried many more unspeakable stories with them behind bloodshot, worldly eyes that seemed to coax your imagination into filling in their life blanks, they all tried their best to sooth their weaknesses with Buddhism and strong weed. Then there were the gang of children that they bore and who were to become my closest friends as we spiralled through laughs, pains and the wilderness of a childhood growing up in the bosom of a community trying to find redemption and peace from the bad, bad worlds they ran from and, at times, still lived in.
Our gang of ‘Buddha-babes’ roamed the Samye Ling Centre and surrounding areas freely and, at times, wildly. We wore the standard hippy kid clothes that were too bright, hideously well-worn and so out of fashion that they have never troubled the style pages before or since. Our hair was as unkempt and tangled as our parents attitudes to discipline or daily structure for their kids. Our playgrounds consisted of hay lofts, deep forests and the buildings and abandoned cars that made up Samye Ling. We shoplifted where we could, smashed as much glass as we could get away with, rode bikes in packs, sledged down vertiginous hills in the winter and swam in deep river pools in the summer. The communal kitchen stores of Samye Ling and the not very well supervised shop provided stolen food, phone cards and fun for us youngsters whilst the older kids disappeared off to smoke joints and fumble with each other in the many secluded places. Air guns, BMX’s, ZX Spectrums, motorbikes, cigarettes, caravans, treehouses and home-made wine all filled our times as we self-governed our way through this chaotic and free-expressionist lifestyle we had discovered for ourselves.
School fast became the only structure in our lives. As you can imagine resistance to authority and discipline was exceptionally and, at times, irretrievably high. The local school board responded to this by putting an alcoholic, golf-loving, chain-smoking, Christian disciplinarian in charge. Mrs Esme Jefferies idolised everyone’s favourite bastion of reasonableness from the time, Margaret Thatcher, and sought to mimic her sartorially, vocally and in her infamous attitude towards liberalism and freedom of expression. A failed tyrant though, (aren’t they all?), Jefferies threw hypocrisy and religious fervour into the coping mix which aided her through her hungover days in this savage outpost of the highly conservative local teaching arena. The results were predictable. Stand-offs in the claustrophobic single classroom occurred on a daily basis between the rigid discipline of Mrs Jefferies and the ‘free-spirited’ chaotic tantrums of the feral pupils. Well… those pupils who actually bothered to come to school that is…This escalated inevitably into full blown shouting matches between Mrs Jefferies and the increasingly irate and indignantly disbelieving hippy parents who took to confronting her teaching methods head-on. The lady wasn’t for turning. Eventually a short-lived breakaway ‘school’ was formed locally, Eskdalemuir Primary School was cut down into into two classrooms, re-enforcements were employed and those children too unmanageable were sent to Lockerbie Primary school for some re-education.
Outside of school the party continued but the end was in sight for the anarchy of those early years of Samye Ling. Two major factors saw an end to this particular hippy dream. Firstly, on the eighth of the eighth of eighty-eight (08/08/1988) Samye Ling officially opened. This landmark saw the completion of the temple and the handing over of the reigns to Akong Rinpoche’s brother, Lama Yeshe. He immediately sought to clamp down to the wilderness of the community and turn Samye Ling into place more fitting for spiritual retreat and contemplation. With that he banned children and teenagers from congregating at the centre and moved the focus of Samye Ling more towards meeting the Spartan needs of the growing community of monks and nuns who were suffering with temptation and distraction by having a ‘lay’ community amongst them. The second key factor was the horrors of the Lockerbie Air Disaster in the December of that same year. A mere twelve miles away from Eskdalemuir Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in mid-air, showering human and aviation debris across the hills around the area before landing , in parts, across the town of Lockerbie and its locale.