THE BODHI STAND

Introduces Dharma Protector 
UPASIKA KUO HSU WAUGH

"I have dream memories of being born, of the bardo before entering my mother's womb, and of vows and resolutions in previous lives that helped bring me here as Barbara Ruth Dorney, born June 21, 1947 in a Manhattan Island hospital," Writes Kuo Hsu. Immediately after her birth she was put in an incubator because she had difficulty breathing. She soon recovered and for the first three years of her life was happy and healthy.

Barbara's parents were both engineers with college degrees in physics. Barbara was the first of three children and her mother gave up working after her birth and didn't hold a job again for fifteen years. Her father was successful enough to provide for all her needs and gave her a feeling of great security.

However, at age three a number of incidents brought to Barbara the realization that all was not well with the world. She became aware that her parents were beings over whom she did not have complete control; they were capable of acting contrary to her wishes and she could find herself separated from them at any time, without warning, whether she wished it or not. The trauma of staying in a hospital without her parents overnight and undergoing a tonsillectomy was a nightmare she couldn't forget. She discovered the weakness of her body; it could be overcome by illness despite her parents' good care. She developed an allergic condition, which expressed itself most often as asthma, although it could take other forms as well--a condition that constantly plagues her to this day.

She learned that the things she took to be her own could be taken away from her. One sunny day in spring a sudden wind grabbed her most precious possession, a blue balloon and carried it off despite her cries of protest.

She found the fixed and regular order of her existence could be changed: her brother's birth disrupted the familiar patterns of family life and brought the depressing knowledge that society values a boy child more than a girl child. "My father had been disowned by his father when he married because he and my mother came from different ethnic backgrounds. However, upon the birth of a son and heir to the family name, my father was taken back into the fold. My birth had passed unnoticed," relates Barbara.

The older Barbara got the less she was able to mix in social groups. She became quieter, more withdrawn, even weird, although she always had one or two good friends. She loved to play and run about but was obstructed by her shyness and the violent asthma attacks that would come with any form of physical exertion keeping her awake at night and leaving her tired and bleary-eyed during the day.

Her imagination became her best companion and the woods her favorite playground. By the time she was five her mother feared she was "mentally ill," but she did well in school even though mathematics and physical sciences did not seem to hold the key to the universe as far as she was concerned.

"I owe my parents much for their open-minded and liberal attitudes. I was encouraged to develop my own particular talents and interests, and to think for myself," says Kuo Hsu. Not satisfied with the status quo, Barbara felt something was missing from the ordinary worldview. She began, without realizing it, to look for this something. She tried Bible school, one summer but, as she puts it, "God didn't give me the power to fly when I prayed to him to prove his existence. I couldn't believe in anything I couldn't understand or perceive directly. Also, I couldn't believe in a compassionate creator who allowed good and innocent people to suffer unjustly and who condemned his more foolish creatures to infinite torment."

After a move to California, Barbara's health improved for a time, and her family was well off materially but a shadow of unhappiness hung over them. Her parents were not getting along well. They kept their feelings hidden but the children sensed the truth and within the family everyone became very isolated from one another. There was a haunting fear that the family would split up.

When Barbara was fourteen she discovered that the five-year-old child she was babysitting had telepathic ability and knew exactly when her parents would return home. There was no doubt about this: several people, her parents, and other baby sitters were aware of it. This gave her her first clue to the limits of science and technology.

When fifteen, Barbara was ill for six months, stayed home, read a lot, and brooded over the problems people make for one another. She realized science and technology were making the possibility of a nuclear war increasingly immanent, but felt that the source of the problem was human nature. She saw that if people don't change their greed, hatred, and stupidity, they will lead to the total destruction of humankind.

Upon returning to school she forced herself to complete a six-month research and writing assignment in the one week left before it was due. Her topic was the problem of racial prejudice as expressed in the works of the most current southern writers. Interested in the subject, she made an all-out effort, concentrating her energy single-mindedly on her work. When she finished she was wandering around the house aimlessly, on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion, when a black man who was doing some housework for her mother started telling her about his life. He had been trained as a pharmacist in the army but because of his race he was blocked from pursuing his ambitions. "I didn't know what to say," Barbara recalls. "I was overwhelmed with a sense of hopeless frustration."

"I took a nap. Suddenly I was falling through space, like Alice down the rabbit hole, but there was no bottom. I knew I was asleep but this was no dream--from all directions all the things I was ever afraid of were coming at me. I had no place to hide, nothing to protect me. I realized this was my real situation in life and horrified, I woke up. The terror I felt was total; it didn't go away. I went to my mother and told her about it. She said not to worry 'It was just a dream,' and I realized she simply wasn't going to understand.

"With a final wrench of anxiety, I saw that no one in the world could help me; there was nothing I could rely upon. Immediately after that thought, a strange thing happened. I felt a kind of amazing joy and peace, I felt totally happy and at ease. I saw through all my attachments, all my views and discriminations. I saw that suffering was the same for everyone, no one was really any better off than anyone else. I found I had a strange power, I could see through and solve any problem or question I turned my mind to. Although good friends as children, for several years my brother and I had not been on speaking terms. Suddenly we were friends again, no problem. After several indescribably free and happy hours I finally decided I couldn't go on in that state of mind--I didn't know how to conduct myself, living in the world, when the usual worldly concerns didn't matter. I would have been glad to leave home if I had known such a thing existed, but at that time I saw no alternative but to come down to earth. I felt I could return to my ordinary state of mind by willing it and did so."

 running around in the back woods of Santa Cruz, Marin, Aspen. She read about witchcraft, yoga, alchemy,  the I Ching, shamanism; folklore, Taoism, pre-Socratic philosophers, mysticism, matriarchal societies in tune with nature, astrology, herbs, psychic healing, etc. She gave up most non-vegetarian food, practiced meditation, conjured a ghost, had several prophetic dreams and telepathic episodes. One time when meditating she saw the face of a sage, an Oriental, and she had the feeling he was helping her somehow.

Turned upside-down by experiments with psychic experiences which, she, lacking the guidance of a good and wise Teacher, was unable to assimilate or understand, soon Barbara once again fell Into despair. She was unfilial to her parents, who were undergoing a divorce, and began admitting to herself that selfishness, stupidity, and a desire not to follow the rules had made her too egotistical to even wish to submit to the guidance of someone wiser than herself. For the first time in her life she felt a sincere wish to find a spiritual teacher.

Nine months later in the summer of 1969 she had a dream. At one point in the dream, accompanied by a female companion, she was running through labyrinthian passageways being pursued by a group of false teachers. Suddenly Barbara pushed through a swinging double door and found herself in a white room full of light. Once inside the room, she was on her own. "In the middle of the room stood a large, very striking man, an Oriental, not young or old, clearly a sage, smiling, totally at ease. I felt at once that he was enlightened, the only person around with any real power. His smile said very clearly that I was now safe, I no longer had to worry about my pursuers."

Nine months after the dream Barbara was attending a weekend conference on Buddhism. She relates: "When the Master arrived I didn't see him at first, I was fascinated by the appearance of his disciples. They had a very peaceful, pure look, totally different from other people. But when the Master began to talk, I listened with all the attention I could muster, feeling that everything he said was of the utmost importance, even though he was speaking Chinese and I could not understand a word. When his lecture was translated my faith in his wisdom was re-affirmed. At one point he said that all of us were there because we had conditions with Samantabhadra Bodhisattva. After we left we could go ahead and forget all we were being told, he said. But I didn't want to forget.

"I felt that I had met the person who could teach me all that I wanted to know, that I would never find what I was seeking anywhere else. A surge of energy, of relief came coursing up from someplace deep within where it had been trapped for longer than I cared to know. No one else at the conference seemed to react to the Master the same way I did. Everyone respected him, but they didn't quite understand. Just as in the room in the dream, I was entirely on my own. I could hardly believe it, but the Master was exactly like the sage I had seen in my dream, his appearance, his smile, his personality."

Since Kuo Hsu took refuge with the Master in July, 1970, her mother, husband, and sister have all taken refuge, practice vegetarian eating, and do other forms of cultivation. Kuo Hsu has received her B.A. in Religious Studies and her M.A. in South and Southeast Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley. The Dharma-door, which sustains her, is the cultivation of the Great Compassion Mantra and the Forty-two Hands.

Recently while participating in a Kuan Yin recitation session at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and seeking for rain to relieve the drought, Barbara saw a cloud forming a perfect Image of Kuan Yin Bodhisattva. "It was in the west, the only cloud in the sky. Before seeing it I had felt very tired, discouraged, and unable to cultivate. Upon seeing it I became happy, at ease, and energetic. The feeling stayed with me throughout the rest of the session, growing day by day," she says.

      "Cultivation is hard, Kuo Hsu admits. "I’m aware of how lucky I am to have been born as a human, to have good parents, to have met up with the Buddhadharma and with a good teacher. I have little merit and few good roots, but even so, any cultivation I do seems to bring a response, while other pursuits lead nowhere. My great wish is to be a good Dharma protector, to help the true Buddhadharma flourish in America so that the world can have peace and everyone can remember their true identity."