Buddhist Audio Books

From Chapter One: A Red-Robed Visitor.

I arrived in Kalimpong in 1950. With me was the venerable Jagdish Kashyap, the learned Buddhist monk with whom I had been studying Pali, Abhidhamma, and Logic at Buddha Kuti, his cottage on the campus of the Benares Hindu University, where he was professor of Pali and Buddhist Philosophy. He had been professor there for 12 years and in January, when I had been with him for 7 months, he decided he needed a change of scene. We would both have a holiday, he declared. He would show me some of the holy places of his native Bihar, and from there, perhaps, we would go up into the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, to a place called Kalimpong. ... We had not been 3 weeks in Kalimpong when he informed me that he would not be returning to the Benares Hindu University. Instead, he would spend some time meditating in the jungles of Bihar, where a Yogi whom he knew had a hermitage. Perhaps, as he meditated, it would become clear to him what he ought to do next. I was to remain in Kalimpong.

‘Stay here and work for the good of Buddhism’, he told me as he left the following morning. ‘The Newars will look after you.’

I was 24, and though I had been a Buddhist for 7 or 8 years, I did not feel experienced enough to work for the good of Buddhism, especially as I was not yet fully ordained.... But the word of the guru was not to be disobeyed, and I bowed in silent acquiescence. Though I did not know it at the time, I was to spend 14 years in Kalimpong.