Tibetan musician shares spiritual teachings

Lying in a hospital bed in India last winter after a deadly car crash, Tibetan composer Nawang Khechog requested a pillow and began to chant.

Hollywood actor Richard Gere, his friend, had paid for a private medical flight to bring the injured former monk to New Delhi after a truck crashed into Khechog's taxi in eastern India, killing the Grammy-nominated composer's niece and injuring his son.

"The hospital would not give me any painkiller," said Khechog, who suffered a brain injury. "I put the pillow behind me, and I sat up straight. I start to meditate."

Khechog, 53, who is scheduled to perform a concert tonight at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, said he summoned the healing power of Tibetan medicine.

"You take all suffering of sentient beings upon yourself," he said in his first US interview since the Feb. 17 accident. "You visualize that and then you give out all suffering. I became like someone else. No pain. Just sitting there very quiet and still."

Khechog has fully recovered and returned to teaching workshops on nurturing compassion and kindness. His teachings, combined with his music for meditation, are based on bedrocks of Tibetan Buddhism, though Khechog said his teachings are not religious.

"It's a spiritual teaching, a universal tool," he said. "Anybody can utilize it."

This weekend he is holding a three-day course titled "Awakening Kindness to Create a Culture of Love" at Kripalu with author Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre.

According to Salzberg and Khechog, compassion and kindness are deceptively simple concepts, yet essential to achieve peace and happiness.

"Love and compassion is the ultimate answer to violence, war, and hatred, whether on an individual level, or community level, or international level," said Khechog, whose family escaped into the mountains when China invaded Tibet in 1959.

Khechog said that humans use only 5 to 10 percent of their ability to experience love and compassion.

"I feel we really should invest money to research is there any tool or way to make people more loving and compassionate," he said.

Khechog teaches his students through a combination of meditation, walking, and circle dance.

"You don't have to be Buddhist, or Christian or Muslim or Hindu or anything," he said. "It is a human value. You can utilize these tools to become more loving toward yourself and others."

Human kindness is like butter in whole milk, he said. "In the milk, there is a butter. But we need to churn it to manifest the butter. In the same way in our heart and mind there is love and compassion. We need to churn it."

Khechog firmly believes that kindness is contagious, spreading from individuals to their families, from families to communities, and eventually from nation to nation.

In September, the world watched the Burmese military brutalizing hundreds of Buddhist monks engaged in peaceful protest. In October, Chinese police beat Tibetan monks as they whitewashed a monastery in honor of the Dalai Lama. International focus on those events and on the plight of Tibetans will eventually bring change, Khechog said.

"There will be a time, not too long, that something good is coming in Burma," said Khechog, who was a monk for 11 years. "The awareness of what's happening there is really growing more."

He lived in the Himalayas for several years studying under Gen Yeshe Topden, a hermit who also has taught Gere. It was Gere who encouraged Khechog to move to America. Khechog now lives in Boulder, Colo., with his second wife, Tsering Khechog, 72.

Nawang Khechog's music, which was used in the soundtrack for the movie "Seven Years in Tibet" starring Brad Pitt, reportedly comforts prodemocracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest in Rangoon 17 years after Burma's military junta prevented her from taking her post as elected prime minister.

South Korean filmmakers recently finished filming Khechog's performances and workshops in India, San Francisco, and Paris for a documentary about his life slated to air next year in the United States via satellite.

Khechog said he experienced one of the most moving experiences of his life last month when he played his flute for Congress and President Bush as they gave the United States Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama.

"They did not say anything bad to China . . . but they all said, 'Look, this man of universal peace, he's not asking for Tibetan independence. He's asking for autonomy, so Tibet can preserve its religious tradition and culture.' It was so powerful to see the center of that power in that rotunda, everyone speaking with one voice," he said.

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