By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Michael Roach and Christie McNally vowed to be both celibate and
never apart by more than 15 feet or so.
(David Sanders for The New York Times)
They live in a yurt in Arizona that is equipped with a
wood-burning stove, but no electricity or running water.
(David Sanders for The New York Times)
TEN years ago, Michael Roach and Christie McNally, Buddhist
teachers with a growing following in the United States and abroad, took vows
never to separate, night or day.
By “never part,” they did not mean only their hearts or spirits.
They meant their bodies as well. And they gave themselves a range of about 15
feet.
If they cannot be seated near each other on a plane, they do not
get on. When she uses an airport restroom, he stands outside the door. And when
they are here at home in their yurt in the Arizona desert, which has neither
running water nor electricity, and he is inspired by an idea in the middle of
the night, she rises from their bed and follows him to their office 100 yards
down the road, so he can work.
Their partnership, they say, is celibate. It is, as they describe
it, a high level of Buddhist practice that involves confronting their own
imperfections and thereby learning to better serve the world.
“It forces you to deal with your own emotions so you can’t say,
‘I’ll take a break,’ ” said Mr. Roach, 55, who trained in the same Tibetan
Buddhist tradition as the Dalai Lama. After becoming a monk in 1983, he trained
on-and-off in a Buddhist monastery for 20 years, and is one of a handful of
Westerners who has earned the title of geshe, the rough equivalent of a
religious doctorate. “You are in each other’s faces 24 hours a day,” he said.
“You must deal with your anger or your jealousy.”
Ms. McNally said, “From a Buddhist perspective, it purifies your
own mind.” Ms. McNally is 35 and uses the title of Lama, or teacher, an honor
not traditionally bestowed on women by the Tibetan orders.
Their exacting commitment to this ideal of spiritual partnership
has been an inspiration to many. In China and Israel, and in the United States,
where they are often surrounded by devotees, their lectures on how laypeople
can build spiritual partnerships are often packed with people seeking mates or
ways to deepen their marriages. They hope their recently published book, “The
Eastern Path to Heaven,” will appeal to Christians and broaden their American
audience.
But their practice — which even they admit is radical by the
standards of the religious community whose ideas they aim to further — has sent
shock waves through the Tibetan Buddhist community as far as the Dalai Lama
himself, whose office indicated its disapproval of the living arrangement by
rebuffing Mr. Roach’s attempt to teach at Dharamsala, India, in 2006. (In a
letter, the office said his “unconventional behavior does not accord with His
Holiness’s teachings and practices.”)
“There is a tremendous amount of opprobrium by the Tibetan monks;
they think they have gone wacky,” said Robert Thurman, a professor of
Indo-Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University.
Professor Thurman, a former monk himself, describes himself as a
friend and admirer of Mr. Roach, and said that after the geshe made his
relationship with Ms. McNally public in 2003, he begged him to renounce his
monastic vows and to stop wearing the robes that mark him as a member of a
monastic order. Mr. Roach declined, and the two have not spoken since.
“He is doing this partnership thing and insisting on being a
monk,” Professor Thurman said. “It is superhuman. He says he is staying
celibate, but people find it hard to believe.”
The yurt in which Mr. Roach and Ms. McNally live when they are not
traveling the world (which is often about half the year) sits in the high
desert some 100 miles east of Tucson, on a platform overlooking a rift in the
cactus-speckled hills. For 100 acres around, the land is the property of
Diamond Mountain University, an unaccredited school that Mr. Roach founded with
Ms. McNally in 2004 to teach Buddhist principles and translation skills.
Although devoid of
modern conveniences, the yurt they live in, which is 22 feet in diameter, feels
almost luxurious compared with the spare, desiccated landscape around it. On
one side of the tent is their double bed, and beside it a commode elegantly disguised
as a wood side table. The floor is covered with carpets. A few carved wooden
chests hold clothes and pillows.
Light streams in
from a hole at the center of the tent’s roof, illuminating its poles, which
were imported from Mongolia. The closeness to nature means that the indoor
temperature is essentially the ambient one — beyond baking in the summer and
freezing in the winter. (Their one attempt to battle the elements is a
wood-burning stove.)
The couple did a
three-year silent retreat in this yurt from 2000 to 2003, while their
relationship was a secret to all but the few people who brought them food. Soon
afterward, Mr. Roach determined it should be public, even if it flew in the
face of two millenniums of Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
He acted for two
reasons, he said. One, he felt that it was impossible to keep secrets in this
age of Google Earth. Two, he decided that if Buddhism was really going to
succeed in America, it would have to be more inclusive of women.
“If these ideas
that will help people are going to make it in the West,” Ms. McNally said, “it
can’t be a male-dominated culture, because people are not going to accept
that.”
Ms. McNally’s path
from student to co-teacher and constant partner has been a hard one, they both
say. When she met Mr. Roach in 1996, two years out of New York University,
where she majored in literature, he was a learned Buddhist. Two decades her
senior, he was a Princeton graduate who in his years studying for the geshe
degree also built a personal fortune by helping to grow Andin International, a
designer, manufacturer and distributor of fine jewelry, from a start-up to a
$100 million-a-year business.
She went to a
seminar he was teaching in New York, where he lived at the time. She was just
back from India, where she had studied meditation. It was not long before they
fell in love, although they do not describe it that way. They say they began to
see each other as angels.
In front of others,
she was his acolyte. Otherwise, she was studying the principles of karma and
emptiness so that she could eventually teach with him. In private, however, she
said, they lived together and he bent over backward to listen to her and to
defer to her wisdom.
Over time the two
grew toward each other, according to friends — he even visibly. He let his hair
grow long like hers and became taut and lean in a way he was not before.
But Anne Lindsey, a
teacher at Diamond Mountain who now goes by the Buddhist nun’s name Chukyi and
has known the couple almost from the start (she was one of those who brought
them their food), said Ms. McNally had changed even more. “She has totally
transformed,” she said. “For him it was a difference in appearance. For her,
she was giggly, she was shy. She never talked. She only focused on Geshe
Michael. Now she is this powerhouse of a teacher.”
There have been
serious sacrifices, of course. When she agreed to join his life, two years before
the spiritual partner vows, she accepted the rigors of his training, including,
at the tender age of 24, celibacy. (He had been celibate, he says, since age 22
when he became a candidate for monkhood.) Even though she now considers sexual
touching a “low practice,” she said, she still clearly remembers the July day
when she gave it up.
But if they have
renounced sex, they have replaced it with a level of communion that few other
people could understand, much less tolerate.
They eat the same
foods from the same plate and often read the same book, waiting until one or
the other finishes the page before continuing. Both, they say, are practices of
learning to submit one’s will to that of another.
They also do yoga
together, breath for breath. “We are always inhaling at the same moment and we
are always exhaling at the same moment,” Ms. McNally said. “It is very
intimate, but it is not the kind of intimacy people are used to.”
The couple also
admit to a hands-on physical relationship that they describe as intense but
chaste. Mr. Roach compares it to the relationship his mother had with her
doctor when she was dying of breast cancer. “The surgeon lay his hand on her
breast, but there wasn’t any carnal thought in his mind,” he said. “He was
doing some life-or-death thing. For us it is the same.”
This insistence
that they share both purity and intimacy drives traditionalists to distraction.
Buddhism has many different branches, most of which allow partners, spiritual
or otherwise, in some form — but not for monks. Experts say the lineage of Mr.
Roach’s branch of Buddhism clearly demands that you renounce monastic vows to
have a partner. And many teachers have done just that.
There are very rare
instances in the Indo-Buddhist tradition of an individual’s being considered
holy enough for a chaste spiritual partnership, said Lama Surya Das, an
American Buddhist who studied in Tibet and wrote “Awakening the Buddha Within,”
published in 1997. But Mr. Roach, Lama Surya Das said, has not convinced
colleagues that he has reached that level.
“He is a good guy
and learned person, but the Bill Clinton question lingers over him,” he said of
Mr. Roach. “He is with a much younger blond bombshell. What is a deep
relationship that is not sexual? It is hard to understand.”
Mr. Roach and Ms.
McNally, however, see their actions as in line with those of a wave of
reformers, including the current Dalai Lama, who are taking an ancient, largely
monastic and male-dominated tradition and modernizing it to make it more
accessible to laypeople and the West.
They understand
that their practice is far too extreme for most couples, but they make a point,
they say, of doing mainstream things, too. They go to the movies, for example.
They tend to like films with visions of alternative realities, like “The
Matrix” (her) and “The Truman Show” (him).
They also talk
about how they continue to struggle with each other’s wills. It is not an easy
practice, even now. But they believe that the basic principles of karma and
emptiness at the heart of Buddhism can improve any relationship.
“We are not saying
people should live in a tent or 15 feet away from each other,” Mr. Roach said.
“What we are teaching is that there is a direct karmic relationship between
every incidence of anger you have in the day and how you see your partner.
“If you are
consciously patient with people during the day, you will see more beauty.”
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