Hello, my friend. Welcome back.
Last time, we sat together in the Egyptian desert --- with a woman named Syncletica, who gave up everything the world called valuable and found, in the silence of a cave, something that didn't need a name. I hope that story stayed with you. I hope it settled somewhere quiet.
Today we're going somewhere very different. We're leaving the dry heat of Alexandria and the pale sand of the Nile delta, and we're climbing. Up through cloud and cold and thin air, up to the high plateau of Tibet --- a landscape so vast and so silent it makes the desert look crowded.
The time is the early nineteenth century. The world is changing fast --- empires rising and falling, old certainties cracking at the edges. And on a mountain in northeastern Tibet, a young man is sitting alone in a cave, singing.
His name is Shabkar. And he has something to say that the world is still, slowly, learning to hear.
I was there. I remember.
Let me tell you about a buffalo.
It's 1818. Nepal. The city of Kathmandu is ancient and layered, a place where the sacred is so woven into daily life that the boundary between temple and street has long since dissolved. And rising above the eastern edge of the city is Boudhanath --- one of the largest stupas in the world. A great white dome, serene and enormous, topped with a tower painted with two enormous eyes that look out in all four directions at once. Those eyes have been watching for a very long time. I know, because I have felt them watching me.
A festival is being prepared. A ganachakra --- a sacred feast, a gathering of practitioners to make offerings, to pray, to celebrate. These are joyful occasions, full of color and sound and the smell of butter lamps. And as was the custom, an animal had been brought for the feast. A buffalo, heavy and dark, patient in the way that animals are patient --- without expectation, without appeal.
A wandering yogi from Tibet stepped forward.
He was not a wealthy man. He had spent years in caves and on mountainsides, owning almost nothing. But he reached into what he had, and he bought that animal's life. Paid for it. And the buffalo walked away.
I have seen a great many gestures in my long years. Grand ones, terrible ones, ones that changed the course of history and ones that no one recorded but me. This was a small one. A quiet one. One animal, one morning, in the shadow of those great watching eyes.
But here is what I have learned about small gestures: they are never only about what they appear to be about.
Shabkar knew that too. He knew it about buffalos. He knew it about the teachings of every tradition he ever encountered. He knew it in his bones, the way you know a thing when you've sat alone in silence long enough for the noise to clear.
Let me tell you about him.
Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol was born in 1781 in Amdo --- a vast, high region in what is now northeastern Tibet, a place of grasslands and rivers and sky that goes on forever. Amdo was not the center of Tibetan political or religious power. That was Lhasa, far to the west, where the great monasteries kept their libraries and their hierarchies and their careful traditions. Amdo was the edge. The frontier. The kind of place where a person could think.
He was spiritually restless from the beginning. By the time he was sixteen, he had already completed a one-year solitary retreat --- not a casual thing, not a weekend in the mountains, but a full year of intensive practice, alone. At twenty he took monastic vows in the Gelug school --- the school of the Dalai Lamas, the most institutionally powerful tradition in Tibet at the time. A sensible choice for an ambitious young practitioner. A good address, spiritually speaking.
But Shabkar was not interested in good addresses.
He studied everywhere. He sought out teachers from every major school --- Gelug, Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya. He received the deepest teachings of the Dzogchen tradition, the ancient and subtle practice of resting in the nature of mind itself, from his root guru Chögyal Ngakgi Wangpo. In a world where lineage boundaries were fiercely maintained, where what school you belonged to determined who would teach you and who would not, Shabkar simply moved through all of them. Not as a tourist. As a student. A serious, devoted, hungry student.
And then he went into the mountains.
For years --- many years --- he lived in retreat. Caves, mostly. High places. A rocky island on the shores of Kokonor, the great Blue Lake of Amdo, one of the largest lakes in all of China, sitting at over ten thousand feet above sea level. I watched him there once, from the shore. A small figure on a bare island, surrounded by cold blue water and cold blue sky, the wind coming off the plateau with nothing to stop it for a thousand miles. He was singing.
That was the other thing about Shabkar. He sang.
In the tradition of the great yogi Milarepa --- who lived seven centuries before him and is still considered the peak of Tibetan yogic and poetic achievement --- Shabkar composed and sang spiritual songs, dohas, spontaneous poems of realization. His collected works run to many volumes. His autobiography, written in the traditional namtar style --- liberation biography, a life story told as a map of awakening --- is considered one of the longest and most accomplished in all of Tibetan literature. He wrote about meditation. He wrote about compassion. He wrote, with unusual passion for his time and place, about the lives of animals and the ethics of what we eat.
He made pilgrimages. Nepal in 1818 and 1819, where we already found him at Boudhanath. He whitewashed stupas with his own hands. He sponsored feasts. He ransomed animals. He taught whoever came to him, from whatever tradition they arrived.
He died in 1851, at the age of seventy. He had spent most of his life outside the walls of any institution, outside the safety of any single lineage's protection. And yet he left behind one of the richest bodies of spiritual writing in Tibetan history.
The mountains of Amdo remembered him. The lake remembered him. I remember him.
To understand what Shabkar was doing, you need to understand what Tibet looked like from the inside in the early nineteenth century.
Tibetan Buddhism was not one thing. It was many things --- ancient, elaborate, and deeply divided along lines of lineage and school and regional loyalty. The Gelug school, with its great monasteries and its connection to the Dalai Lama's political authority, held enormous institutional power. The Nyingma school, older and wilder, guarded its own ancient transmissions with fierce pride. The Kagyu and Sakya schools had their own histories, their own heroes, their own reasons to maintain distance from the others. And underneath all of them, older still, was Bön --- the indigenous spiritual tradition of Tibet, which Buddhism had absorbed, argued with, and never quite displaced.
These divisions were not merely academic. They shaped who taught whom. They shaped which monasteries received patronage and which did not. They shaped, in very practical ways, the texture of a practitioner's entire life. You belonged somewhere. You were of a lineage. And that lineage was, quietly or loudly, better than the others.
Shabkar found this --- I want to choose my word carefully here --- unconvincing.
Not in an angry way. Not as a rebel making a point. He simply looked at the teachings themselves, sat with them in silence, turned them over in his mind in caves and on mountainsides for years, and arrived at a conclusion that felt, to him, inescapable: the awakened mind that all these traditions were pointing toward was the same awakened mind. The finger pointing at the moon was not the moon. And arguing about whose finger was more correct was --- he was gentle about this, but clear --- a waste of precious time.
He wrote it plainly. All traditions --- Buddhist schools, Bön, even non-Buddhist religions --- were, in his understanding, expressions of the same awakened compassion. Emanations of the same Buddha mind, wearing different clothes for different people in different times and places. This was not a popular position. It was not the kind of thing that made you welcome in every monastery. But it was what he saw, and Shabkar was not in the habit of saying things he didn't mean.
And then there were the animals.
This is the part that I find quietly remarkable, even now. The question of how we treat animals was not, in early nineteenth century Tibet, a pressing public conversation. It existed within Buddhist ethics --- the principle of non-harm, ahimsa, the recognition that animals too are sentient beings caught in the same web of suffering and seeking --- but it was not often the subject of sustained, passionate, practical writing. Shabkar wrote about it anyway. He wrote at length about vegetarianism, about the suffering of animals raised for food, about the moral weight of a life that could feel pain and fear and the desire to continue existing.
And he didn't just write about it. He stood at a feast at the foot of the most sacred stupa in Nepal and bought a buffalo's freedom with his own money.
That act lands differently depending on who you are and what you believe. But I want you to sit with what it meant in context. This was a man who had no institutional backing, no wealthy monastery behind him, no political protection. He had his practice, his songs, and whatever he carried on his back. And he looked at an animal waiting to die and decided that his resources --- modest as they were --- were better spent on that life than on anything else he might have done with them that morning.
That is not a theological position. That is a way of being in the world.
What Shabkar was doing, in his non-sectarianism and in his compassion for animals, was something that his tradition had the language for but that the institutions of his tradition had not fully lived. He was taking the teachings seriously. All the way down. Past the point where it was comfortable, past the point where it was convenient, past the point where it stopped making powerful people happy.
I have seen this pattern before. It tends to produce either saints or troublemakers. Sometimes both at once.
Shabkar was lucky. He was beloved. The people of Amdo, the students who found him in his caves and on his islands, the pilgrims who encountered him at the great stupas --- they recognized something in him. Not a rebel. Not a reformer with an agenda. Just a man who had sat in silence long enough to see clearly, and who was now, gently and persistently, inviting everyone around him to see the same thing.
Shabkar was not alone in his instinct. He was just early.
About thirty years after his death, a movement began to take formal shape in eastern Tibet --- the Rimé movement, a deliberate, organized effort by some of the greatest teachers of the age to preserve and share teachings across all the Tibetan schools, to insist that the wealth of each tradition belonged, in some essential way, to all of them. It was a remarkable flowering. The names associated with it --- Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, Jamgön Kongtrul, Chogyur Lingpa --- are still revered as among the most important figures in modern Tibetan Buddhism.
Shabkar never met any of them. He predated the movement by decades and arrived at its central insight entirely on his own, in silence, on an island in a high cold lake. He didn't organize. He didn't build an institution. He just lived what he saw, and wrote it down, and sang it into the wind.
This is worth pausing on. The Rimé masters worked through scholarship and collaboration, through the careful gathering and transmission of endangered lineages. Shabkar worked from the inside out --- from meditation so deep and so sustained that the walls between traditions simply stopped appearing real to him. Two paths to the same clearing.
What he contributed to the world's spiritual imagination was this: the idea that the boundaries human beings draw around their sacred traditions are human boundaries. Useful, perhaps. Meaningful in their context, certainly. But not ultimate. Not the last word. The teachings of the Gelug school and the Nyingma school and the Kagyu school and the ancient Bön tradition were not, in his understanding, competing claims about reality. They were different faces of the same recognition, shaped by different landscapes and different centuries and different human needs, but oriented --- all of them --- toward the same light.
I have watched this kind of seeing emerge, quietly, in many times and many places. I watched Francis of Assisi look at a wolf and see a brother. I watched the Sufi poets dissolve the boundaries between lover and beloved until the very question of separation became absurd. I watched the desert mothers and fathers of Egypt --- Syncletica among them --- sit in such profound stillness that the distinctions they had walked into the desert carrying began, one by one, to release their grip.
What these moments share is not a doctrine. It is a direction. A consistent orientation, appearing across centuries and traditions and continents, toward the recognition that what is most sacred in any human being is not diminished by what is most sacred in another. That the light in one lamp does not compete with the light in the lamp beside it.
Shabkar would have said --- did say, in his careful and gentle way --- that the various traditions of his world were all expressions of the same awakened compassion. He didn't claim to have solved the question of which tradition was truest. He had simply sat in silence long enough to notice that they were all, unmistakably, pointing in the same direction.
Toward something that has no denomination. No school. No lineage that can be owned.
He saw it from a cave in Amdo. He saw it from an island on a cold blue lake. He saw it in the eyes painted on a great white dome in Nepal, watching without judgment in all four directions at once.
The sun, he seemed to be saying, is not the property of any window.
I thought about that for a long time after I watched him on that shore. I am still thinking about it.
Here is something I have noticed, in all my long years of watching.
Every generation produces people who are certain that their tradition holds the truth and the others do not. And every generation also produces people --- quieter, less celebrated, often sitting alone somewhere --- who look at all the traditions at once and see something different. Shabkar was one of those people. He was not unique in his seeing. He was just unusually clear about it, and unusually willing to say so.
I want to say it too. Clearly. Without apology.
The great religions of this world --- the ones you pass on your way to work, the ones whose buildings anchor the corners of your town, the ones represented at every interfaith gathering where people sit in careful, hopeful circles trying to find common ground --- they are not competitors. They were never competitors. They are expressions of the same longing, the same reaching, the same ancient human recognition that there is something real beyond what the eye can see and the hand can touch.
I have watched all of them begin. I have watched Buddhism take root in the valleys of northern India and spread, century by century, across the whole of Asia --- through Tibet and China and Japan and Southeast Asia, wearing different robes in each place but carrying the same lamp. I have watched Christianity move out of a small occupied province in the Middle East and become the faith of billions, its core insistence on love and compassion and the dignity of every human soul echoing across two thousand years. I have watched Islam arise in the deserts of Arabia and build, within a century, one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen --- its commitment to justice, to knowledge, to the unity of God, shaping the lives of more than a billion people today. I have watched Hinduism, oldest of the great living traditions, hold within itself a diversity of practice and philosophy so vast that it contains multitudes --- and still points, through all of it, toward the same horizon. I have watched Judaism carry its ancient covenant through exile and persecution and renewal, its insistence on the sanctity of life and the demands of justice never dimming. I have watched the indigenous traditions of every continent tend their sacred relationships with the living world, holding knowledge that the newer religions are only now beginning to learn to ask for.
Different words. Different prophets. Different prayers, different calendars, different names for what is holy.
The same sun.
This is not a sentimental observation. It is not the kind of thing you say to be polite at an interfaith gathering and then quietly set aside on the way home. It is, I think, one of the most important things the human race is in the process of understanding --- slowly, imperfectly, with a great deal of resistance from the parts of us that would rather be right than be whole.
Shabkar saw it in a cave in Amdo in the early nineteenth century. He saw it so clearly that the institutional walls of his own tradition simply stopped being real to him. He didn't tear them down. He walked through them, gently, as though they were made of light.
That is what is available to us now. Not the abandonment of our traditions --- Shabkar never abandoned his. He went deeper into it. But the recognition that going deep enough into any genuine tradition eventually brings you to the same place. The same silence. The same light. The same unnameable something that every human heart has always known was there.
The sun does not belong to any window.
It never did.
So here is what I want to leave with you today.
Not a task. Not an assignment. Just a question to carry.
You have a tradition, perhaps. Or you had one once. Or you are still looking for one. Or you have decided, carefully and not without reason, that none of them are for you. Whatever your relationship to the sacred is --- and it is yours, and I respect it completely --- I want to ask you something honest.
Can you see it in the others?
Not agree with them. Not convert to them. Not set aside the things that trouble you about them --- and there are things that should trouble you, in every tradition, including your own. I am not asking for that kind of easy generosity that costs nothing because it requires nothing.
I am asking something harder.
Can you stand in a mosque at the hour of prayer and feel, underneath the words you don't know and the practice that isn't yours, something that you recognize? Can you sit at the edge of a Buddhist meditation hall and sense, in the quality of the silence, a presence that your own tradition has another name for? Can you walk into a cathedral, or a synagogue, or a Hindu temple blazing with color and sound and incense, or a simple Quaker meeting room with nothing in it but chairs and light --- and find, somewhere beneath your differences, something that feels like home?
That is the question Shabkar's life puts to us. Not whether all religions are the same --- they are not, and flattening them into sameness does no one any favors. But whether the light in them is the same light.
It is a question worth sitting with. Alone, if possible. In silence, if you can manage it.
Shabkar would approve of the silence.
Next time, we travel back to the fourth century. To a man whose mind was so extraordinary, so restless, so relentlessly precise, that the church he served didn't quite know what to do with him --- while he was alive, and even less so after he was gone.
His name was Evagrius Ponticus. He was a theologian, a mystic, a desert father, and one of the most influential Christian thinkers you have almost certainly never heard of. He wrote about the inner life with a clarity and a psychological precision that feels, even now, startlingly modern. And more than a century after his death, a church council declared his teachings heretical and ordered his books destroyed.
They didn't get all of them.
The ideas survived. Quietly, anonymously, woven into the writings of other teachers who borrowed from him without saying his name --- because saying his name had become dangerous. His thought shaped Christian mysticism for a thousand years, from the shadows, unacknowledged, like a root system no one could see but everyone was standing on.
Some threads, it turns out, are too strong to cut.
I will see you then, my friend. Thank you for walking this road with me today. Thank you for being willing to sit with a hard question rather than a comfortable answer. That is, I think, exactly what Shabkar would have wanted from you.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.