Inter "View" from the Plaza: Jane Bay, Assistant to George Lucas for 35 Years
September 4, 2013 by Jenny Kimball
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Jane Bay and I during her recent visit to La Fonda over Indian Market. |
Jane Bay has worked for Lucasfilm for the past three decades. She is the author of Love and Loss: A Story About Life, Death and Rebirth and Precious Jewels of Tibet. Now that she has retired from Lucasfilm, Jane is planning to pursue her career as an author and hopes to finish the current book she's writing Growing Up Southern – Stories from the Attic of Childhood Memories, in the coming year.
Q. You have taken a lot of chances in your life—leaving college to become involved with the civil rights movement, leaving your first job in showbiz to work on Jerry Brown's campaign, meeting the Dalai Lama and traveling to Tibet, and abandoning your initial plans to move to New Mexico to work with George Lucas. What experience has influenced your life the most?
A. The Civil Rights Movement and moving to New York. Growing up in the south, I was just blown away by New York and that there was no segregation. Everyone was together on the streets and they all seemed happy. When working in the city for NBC, I had a political awakening that widened my world.
Q.What's changed for women in the film business since you started your career?
A. Women have made a lot of progress in breaking the glass ceiling but they are still fighting for everything. I mentored many women who have gone on to assume many different roles in the industry.
Q. You know I have to ask this one – what is it like working with George Lucas?
A. He was the most inspiring, generous, kind and dynamic person. He set the bar so high.
Q. Are you are Star Wars fan? Favorite character?
A. Of course! Princess Leah.
Q. If someone were visiting Santa Fe for the first time, what are some of the not-to-miss places you would recommend?
A. La Fonda on the Plaza because it is the quintessential experience of Santa Fe. Whether you stay as a guest in the exquisitely remodeled rooms or come for dinner in La Plazuela Restaurant, you will be enthralled by the authentic art and cultural history of the hotel.
Q. If you could experience someone else's life for one day, whose would it be and why?
A. Georgia O'Keeffe. Her vision was so unique and I would just love walking through her footsteps. When I look up at the mesas that she painted—I could swear the sagebrush is still the same as her paintings.
Q. What is it about New Mexico that made you consider moving here?
A. New Mexico resonated with me—it is a place where I can have a connection to nature and the natural world.
Q. What song gets stuck in your head most often?
A. As I was driving to Santa Fe from the Albuquerque airport, I was listening to Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones. The lyrics speak of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico.
Each time Jane Bay visits La Fonda, she adorns her favorite room with a vibrant collection of serapes, her extraordinary antique bottles topped with crystal crosses, blankets, pillows and throws. See photos below for some examples of her decorative vignettes.






August 11, 2006
"A
Daughter Lost, A Mother Found: Love Reincarnate"
Jane Bay, personal assistant to George Lucas,
discusses the death of her adopted daughter—and
the e-mails that brought rebirth.
by Barbara Tannenbaum, Pacific Sun
Reincarnation
is one of Tibetan Buddhism’s key ideas,
along with compassion and impermanence.
A few weeks ago, as I drove along Sir Francis
Drake Boulevard in the midst of Marin’s
scorching heat wave, I had no argument with the
last two ideas. Compassion? In that furnace-like
air, we were suffering as one. Impermanence? Who
wasn’t worried he was going to melt into
the pavement?
But after talking with local author Jane Bay
in her home in San Anselmo and later at the Spirit
Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, I wondered
how we should define “reincarnation.”
Maybe it’s something that happens while
we’re still here. After meeting Bay, that
makes sense. You’d be surprised how many
different lives one person can pack into her years.
Bay is the author of two books on Tibet. The
forthcoming Love & Loss: A Story About Life,
Death, and Rebirth details her personal journey
into Tibetan life and culture during the past
two decades. Her previous book, Precious Jewels
of Tibet: A Journey to the Roof of the World,
is an account of her visits to Tibet and India
in 1994 and 1997 with her spiritual mentor and
friend, the Buddhist monk Lobsang Samten, a member
of the Dalai Lama’s monastic household.
Upon its publication in 1998, Precious Jewels
was reviewed in The New York Times, which described
Bay as “the Buddhist pilgrim as Everytourist,
with videocam and portable compact-disc player,
meeting the ancient verities of the East in the
search for enlightenment.”
In her new work, Bay returns to those years,
then carries us forward through her third and
fourth trips to Tibet in 2003 and 2004 to focus
on the story of her adopted daughter, Namgyal
Youdon. The book opens with a narrative describing
how Bay originally met the girl as a 13-year-old
during a visit to the Tibetan Children’s
Village (TCV) in Dharmsala, India. She agrees
to sponsor Namgyal financially, for the facility
is both a school and an orphanage. We meet Namgyal’s
two brothers, her still-living physician father,
and witness the growing mother-daughter bond between
Bay and Namgyal. It is a bond that survives distance,
displacement and a politically motivated disappearance—instigated
when the Chinese government swept Namgyal away
from TCV, offering no forwarding address.
It’s a bond that survives even death.
For the central theme of this story is grief
and its aftermath. Bay covers nine years in one
chapter, telling us that Namgyal died suddenly
on July 18, 2003, at age 22 from a heart aneurysm
on an ordinary morning in Lhasa, Tibet. It was
10 days before she was to make her first journey
to visit Bay in America.
“I wrote this book for many reasons,”
Bay says. “The first was to look at grief
right in the face. How do we grieve? How do women
grieve in relation to men? What do we feel safe
to express? Can we reach out and ask for help?”
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BAY, IT TURNS out, did ask for help. She told
the news of her loss in the form of several lengthy
e-mails sent to a wide circle of friends and family.
The responses she got back startled her. “I
learned that if you share grief with other people,
it does diminish it,” she says. “You
couldn’t have told me that at the time.
But I wasn’t able to talk about my feelings.
The only way I expressed my sadness was through
writing.” The immediacy and emotion Bay
shared in her e-mails prompted similar responses
from the people she contacted. E-mails came back
with more stories of loss and healing. Her friends
asked whether they could pass on specific instances
where Bay described a ritual she performed on
behalf of Namgyal. “I realized that these
e-mails were much bigger than my own experience.”
Bay shared these observations with me from the
country kitchen of her 1910 farmhouse.
Although several oak trees shaded a lovely garden,
the air outdoors was as hot as a furnace. She
ushered me into her air-conditioned home and filled
large glasses with iced tea. With her oversized
glasses and gray hair swept into a bun, Bay has
a commanding presence. She is 65 and proud of
it. But her voice still holds traces of her Florida
childhood and there is no mistaking her Southern
hospitality. Her lilting laugh, wide-set green
eyes and a trusting smile evoke the Southern belle
she once was.
A tour of her home reveals several more facts
in short order. First there is the dining room
table laden with objects and tools Bay has purchased
during her trips to Tibet. There are devotional
prayer beads, leather tool belts, beaded necklaces,
talismans made of wooden blocks, portable shrines,
Tibetan bells, brass water bottles and more. There
is the shrine she has set up to honor Namgyal.
Moving to the living room, there is Native American
artwork near the grand piano, a collection of
Navajo spoons and a picture of the Dalai Lama
over the fireplace. Upstairs is her office and
writing room, a remodeled balcony with three walls
of windows. It’s groaning with books, mementos
and photo albums. “And it was here,”
Bay says, “that George wrote his third Star
Wars movie, Return of the Jedi.”
That would be George, as in George Lucas—producer,
director, writer and chairman of Lucasfilm, who
built Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael. Bay has served
as Lucas’s personal assistant for 29 years,
since 1977. (Her official title is executive assistant
to the chairman.) She is also the curator of Lucas’s
extensive collection of American illustrator art.
(In fact, she would break from our interview at
2pm to receive a call from Coeur d’Alene
Art Auction to bid by telephone on a 1915 oil
panting by N.C. Wyeth titled “Two Boys in
a Punt.”)
“This is his house,” Bay laughs.
“I’ve lived here for 26 years. He
bought this house with the money from American
Graffiti. He wrote Stars Wars upstairs. He loves
all the memories connected with this house. He’s
a good landlord but I don’t expect he’ll
ever sell it to me.”
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ACCORDING TO BAY’S publishers, Clear Light
Press, her new book is the first nonfiction memoir
to incorporate e-mails as the bulk of its narrative.
Such a development was bound to happen. Biographers
rely on letters and diaries to reconstruct the
emotional terrain of their subjects’ lives,
and e-mails capture the vivid, immediate record
of an event or thought process before a certain
distance sets in.
If there is one criticism of the book, it is
that Bay does not identify the correspondents
who reply to her e-mails. We read their names
and their responses. But whether someone is her
oldest friend, a co-worker or a highly esteemed
teacher of Buddhist philosophy is something the
reader must divine from context.
“Look,” Bay explains, “I’ve
always had a large circle of friends that I’ve
considered my extended family. I grew up in the
’60s when the traditional nuclear family
fell apart during the hippie movement. I know
that e-mail, even three years ago, was considered
a second-class way to communicate with your friends,
especially about a subject as heavy as death.
People wrote back to me, apologizing for sending
an e-mail response, because it’s still considered
an impersonal medium. But all I can say is that
when my daughter Namgyal died, they rallied around
the campfire.”
Some names leap out. Most readers will recognize
Goldie Hawn, Francis Ford Coppola and Sylvia Boorstein.
Perhaps that’s as it should be.
Public awareness of Tibet’s plight, beginning
with the invasion by the Chinese military in 1950,
and heightened thereafter by the Chinese government’s
policy of repression, has been brought to the
public consciousness by the work of actors such
as Richard Gere.
Of course, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and
temporal leader of Tibet, who fled Tibet in 1959
for safe refuge in Dharamsala, India, advised
the monks of his order “to enter the world
and spread Tibetan Buddhist culture” as
a strategy for survival. And his nation’s
plight received the world’s attention when,
based on his nonviolent efforts to end the Chinese
occupation, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1989.
U.S. cultural institutions (including museums,
universities and publishing houses) went a long
way toward welcoming Tibetan culture and spreading
its precepts and traditions.
In 1988, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart brought
the Gyuto monks to the facilities at Skywalker
Ranch to record a CD of their chants. Apparently
the word spread among their peer group. When the
Namgyal monks from the Dalai Lama’s monastery
arrived at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History
to make a sand mandala in 1989, they asked their
hosts if they could visit Skywalker Ranch. “Apparently,
‘skywalker’ is the English translation
of a sanskrit word ‘Daikini,’”
Bay explains. (Daikinis are female deities who
help seekers gain power through visualizations.)
“So I arranged for them to come up and have
a private meeting with George.”
Bay first met her friend Lobsang—with whom
she traveled to Tibet—at that private meeting.
But don’t waste a minute thinking that Bay’s
personal connections gained through her work at
Lucasfilm made her Tibetan relationships possible.
Bay has long found herself on the cutting edge
of social trends, meeting the right people at
the most auspicious moment long before she met
George Lucas.
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BORN IN 1941 in the town of Leesburg, Florida,
Bay is a few years older than the first crop of
baby boomers. But those few years made a big difference.
She was old enough to participate—as opposed
to watching on TV—nearly every significant
cultural drama that unfolded in those tumultuous
postwar decades. Take Elvis Presley. Bay met him
as a 14-year-old in 1955 a year before his appearance
on the Ed Sullivan Show. She had heard his earliest
music after sneaking in the garage at night to
turn on the radio in her father’s new car.
“Let’s just say I was moved to the
core of my first root chakra,” Bay recalls
with a salacious smile. The teenage Bay was determined
to see Elvis perform. When he finally came to
Florida on tour with the Grand Ole Opry, Bay and
her girlfriend waited all day by the gated rear
entrance of the local armory. Thus she was able
to meet Elvis at the precise moment in his career
when he could drive up in a spanking new pink
Cadillac, yet still greet his fans individually.
“He got out of his car,” Bay remembers,
“and came over to say hello to us. I asked
him for his home address, saying I wanted to start
a fan club and he gave it to me.” (And for
what happened the following year when Elvis returned
to town, you’ll have to wait for Bay to
complete her next book, Growin’ Up Southern.)
Consider this: The 1994 movie Forrest Gump is
a strange fantasy of luck and happenstance where
an ordinary guy is present at every postwar landmark
moment, thereby influencing the ’60s cultural
revolution. In contrast, Bay’s life is certainly
about being at the right place at the right time.
But she was ready to seize the moment, and often
figured out where the right place would be in
advance. “I was raised to be Miss Popularity
and earn a Mrs. degree,” she says. But fierce
willpower and determination lurked beneath that
demure persona of a Southern belle.
Consider these moments from Bay’s highlight
reel: Transformed by the civil rights movement
in the South, she dropped out of college in 1963
to move to New York City. “My friend said,
‘What are we going to do for jobs?’
I said, ‘I want to work in television.’
So we opened the phone book and looked up the
numbers for NBC and CBS. I got a job as a receptionist
in NBC’s station-relations department and
she got hired at the Columbia Records division
of CBS. That started our life in the entertainment
industry.”
Bay then discovered a way to come to California
when she heard that NBC was establishing a political
news unit to cover the 1964 elections. “They
were going to cover the Republican National Convention
at the Cow Palace, where Barry Goldwater won the
nomination,” Bay says.
She moved to Los Angeles for good in 1965, having
met her first husband, Don Bay, when he was still
in law school. “He was a flaming liberal,”
she laughs, “who took me to ACLU meetings
where they were preparing to defend the singer
Pete Seeger from charges of communism.”
Bay’s first (and later second) marriage
ended in divorce. But during her Los Angeles sojourn,
she met the future governor of California, Jerry
Brown, and managed his very first election in
1969 for the Los Angeles Community College Board
of Trustees. She dated Warren Beatty, learned
Transcendental Meditation from Mike Love and Al
Jardine of the Beach Boys, and worked at Columbia
Pictures for Frank Pierson (the writer/producer/director
whose films include Cool Hand Luke and Cat Ballou).
She partied with Brown’s friend, attorney
Tom Pollock (one of the co-founders of the American
Film Institute) at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe,
a landmark Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles.
“I met all the fabulous Hollywood people
who were alive at the time—Spencer Tracy,
Audrey Hepburn, Omar Sharif, Burt Lancaster,”
she remembers.
Once again, Bay was in the right place at the
right time and ready to act. Pollock introduced
her to one of his clients, a young filmmaker named
George Lucas, who by 1977 had two hits under his
belt—American Graffiti and the original
Star Wars.
“Tom said his friend was looking for an
assistant, someone to help him set up and manage
his office in Marin County,” Bay says. “At
that point, George was ready to try something
new. I met him at his little office at Universal
Studios. He asked if I would be happy working
in a small town in Northern California. He didn’t
know that after years of my own spiritual seeking—trying
out Transcendental Meditation, Sufism, feminist
consciousness raising, I was already planning
to leave the drama of Hollywood behind. George
hired me on the spot and I moved to San Anselmo
a few weeks later.”
On the one hand, what is significant about this
meeting is that Bay has now worked as Lucas’s
personal assistant for the past 29 years. Or perhaps
it is significant because two years later, in
1979, the Dalai Lama made his first visit to the
U.S., including an appearance in San Anselmo.
“I’d already attended a Tibetan event
at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A.,” says
Bay. “I was seduced by all the bells and
incense and the rich fabrics of the Tonka paintings.
But hearing the Dalai Lama’s teachings sparked
a flame in my heart, leading me to begin exploring
the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism.”
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HOW DID A good Southern girl—one raised
Methodist, to read the Bible, and attend church
every Sunday—become a practicing student
of Tibetan Buddhism? For Bay has embraced the
concept of reincarnation and practices daily meditation.
Her writing reveals a detailed knowledge of Buddhist
practices and rituals that she movingly followed
in the wake of Namgyal’s death, including
the Tibetan memorial rites that last for 49 days
from the death of the loved one as his or her
soul or consciousness journeys through the Bardo
(a period in the afterlife explained in the Tibetan
Book of the Dead), until it re-enters its new
mother’s womb, beginning anew the cycle
of life, death and rebirth.
“There are many milestones on my journey
into Tibetan culture,” Bay says. “But
the key is how my Southern tradition dealt with
death. In my experience growing up, even though
everyone was Southern Methodists or Baptists,
no one had the skills or the tools or the ability
to grieve for the losses of their loved one.”
Bay paused for a moment at her kitchen table;
tears welled up in her eyes as she described her
first experience with death at the age of 12.
Her favorite cousin, Gene Neighbors, jumped off
a building at Florida State College, committing
suicide in 1953.
“My mother, Ina Blanche Morris, and I went
to Eustis, Florida, for the funeral,” she
recalls. “Everyone was so distraught and
crying. There were hushed whispers and a great
deal of speculation, because in a Southern family,
suicide was a very shameful thing.
“I was so stunned about it, seeing his
body laid in a casket. I didn’t find any
solace in my religious practice that helped me
deal with Gene’s death. And after he died,
why, it became even worse,” Bay says, her
voice shading over into tones of indignant anger.
“Because all the pictures of him were taken
out of the house. It was too painful for my aunt
and uncle to see these pictures of their son who
had died. He was never spoken of, again.
“What happened in my family with Gene was
that everyone shut it down,” Bay says. “No
one talked about it. And grief will not let you
do that. It will come up in other ways,”
she says with emphasis. “It will come up
in sickness or through disassociation, disconnection
from other people, isolation. And I saw that happen
in my family.”
Bay’s face softens for a moment before
recounting another story. It’s a more positive
story, one she feels should be paired alongside
that of her cousin’s. In 1961, the summer
between her freshman and sophomore years of college,
Bay worked in a hotel in the Catskills in upstate
New York. There, she heard that Patty Welch, her
best friend from high school, had grown seriously
ill from cancer. Although Bay could not arrive
in time for a last visit, she did come before
the funeral.
“My mother was a hairdresser. She did everyone’s
hair—in fact, I never washed or cut my own
hair until I left for college. Well, all my friends
loved her so much,” Bay remembers. “Her
nickname was Billie. So I returned home the day
after Patty died. Her grandparents asked my mother
if she would wash Patty’s hair and do her
makeup. I went along with her to help. Seeing
my mother touch the body, and make Patty’s
hair beautiful, and put this beautiful makeup
on her, it was such a loving thing. I just felt
much more at peace about Patty dying, because
my mother had been there for her.”
Ina Blanche Morris passed away in 1999 at the
age of 88. “Even though I had a good relationship
with my mother, and I was with her the week she
died, I was pretty undone about her passing for
a period of six months. I finally decided I was
going to follow the Dali Lama’s suggestion.
He said, ‘It behooves us to make a systematic
study of the process of dying so we know what
will come for us when the time arrives.’
That seemed like a practical idea because death
is inevitable for all of us. And I found that
daily meditation gives you a place to hold the
grief.
“But when Namgyal died,” Bay continues,
“it all went right out the window. Because
the magnitude of her loss, the timing of her loss—you
know, 10 days before she was due to arrive in
the United States for the first time—it
was more than I could bear. I knew all about the
Buddhist practices I needed to do for her, the
rituals to help her soul move through the 49 days
in the Bardo, and other ceremonies and rituals
I detail in the book. But it wasn’t enough.
“As her American mother, I had to find my
own way through this grieving process. Without
any intentional design, I started sending out
these e-mails.”
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AS BAY’S READERS know, the author always
wanted to have children, yet the circumstances
of her two marriages did not allow her wish to
be fulfilled, either through biological parenthood
or adoption. “When Namgyal died, all my
dreams and expectations about what we were going
to have together just vanished in the blink of
an eye,” she says. “But I realized
that by inventing new rituals and sharing this
experience with other people, I was creating a
process for grieving that was solely mine. I wasn’t
just following The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I
was taking traditions from Native Americans, Christians,
Sufi dancing and Buddhist practice to make my
own way through these feelings.”
Today, Bay corresponds regularly by e-mail with
Namgyal’s two brothers and continues to
offer both emotional and financial support. In
the book, a moving narrative thread describes
Bay’s growing embrace of Namgyal’s
family, which only grew stronger in the wake of
her passing. “I’m their mother, too,”
Bay explains.
She opens a worn pocket notebook to read off
Namgyal’s siblings’ pertinent information:
Namgyal’s younger brother, Tsetan Khensur,
27, is an unmarried student ready to graduate
from the Tibet Medical College in October 2006.
Namgyal’s older brother, Tenzin Tsering,
now 29, lives in Lhasa, Tibet, with his wife Lhakyi
and their young daughter, Tenzin Monkyi.
“I am a grandmother,” Bay smiles
brightly. “And in December, Tenzin and Lhakyi
are going to have a second child.”
You know what that means? “A fifth trip
to Tibet, probably in the spring of 2007.”
But no one will take the place of Namgyal in Bay’s
heart. “Namgyal is the person who transformed
me. She gave me the opportunity to love her unconditionally.
I’m grateful for all the gifts that loving
her and losing her afforded me. I learned you
could create a sanctuary through ritual. Through
ritual, the people we love who have passed on
can still participate actively in our lives.”
See Jane Bay’s Tibetan photography on display
at the Marin Civic Center September 6 through
9. She is also hosting “The Wheel of Life”
featuring sand painting, lectures and music. See
www.janebay.com for more details.
Barbara Tannenbaum is a freelance writer based
in San Rafael. Her work has appeared in ‘The
New York Times,’ ‘Los Angeles Times,’
Salon.com and ‘Sunset’ magazine.
PHOTO BY RORY MCNAMARA
September 7, 2006
Wheel of Life: Former monk illustrates spirituality,
impermanence with sand mandala
by Richard Halstead, Marin Independent Journal
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PATIENCE: Former Tibetan
monk Losang Samten creates a sand mandala
in the Manzanita Room of the Marin Center
in San Rafael. Jane Bay of San Anselmo arranged
for the visit to help educate the public about
Tibetan Buddhism and the plight of the Tibetan
people under Chinese rule. (IJ photo/Alan
Dep ) |
Former Tibetan monk Losang Samten bent over
a circular table at the Marin Center in San Rafael
on Wednesday and with one hand wielded his chakpur,
a long-nosed metal funnel containing brightly
colored sand, with the dexterity of a surgeon.
Samten, attired in a dark gray monk's robe, used
his other hand to run a metal rod on the serrated
surface of the chakpur, causing vibrations that
sent the sand flowing slowly down like liquid
onto his sketched mandala.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before
the first Burning Man art festival, Tibetan Buddhists
were creating intricate paintings made of sand
to illustrate mankind's spiritual dilemma, and
then dismantling them to demonstrate life's impermanence.
Samten drew a steady stream of spectators Wednesday
as he began the creation of a traditional "Wheel
of Life" sand mandala in the Manzanita Room
at the Marin Center in San Rafael. Samten will
continue working on the mandala through Saturday,
when it will be ceremoniously swept away.
"There is a beauty, but beauty never lasts
as beauty all the time," Samten said. "Life
is impermanent."
Jane Bay of San Anselmo, the woman responsible
for bringing Samten to Marin, knows all too well
the ramifications of life's impermanence. Bay's
Tibetan foster daughter, Namgyal Youdon, died
at 22 in 2003 of a brain aneurysm just as she
was preparing for a trip to the United States
to visit Bay. Bay has written a memoir about her
loss of Namgyal, just published by Clear Light
Publishing.
Bay said she arranged for Samten to visit Marin
as part of a multimedia blitz to educate the public
about Tibetan Buddhism and the plight of the Tibetan
people, who remain under the political domination
of the People's Republic of China.
Photos of Bay's many trips to India, Nepal and
Tibet are on display in the Manzanita Room. At
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Chaksampa, a Tibetan folk
music and dance company, will perform at the Marin
Center's Showcase Theatre.
Samten, formerly a monk at the Dalai Lama's monastery
in India, said the "Wheel of Life" mandala
uses symbolic and cosmological imagery to exhibit
the psychic struggle within human consciousness.
Three animals - a pig, a rooster and a snake -
will be at the center of the wheel, Samten said.
The pig represents ignorance, the rooster represents
greed or attachment, and the snake represents
anger.
"These three in the mind are the cause of
suffering," Samten said. "If we want
individual peace and global peace, we need to
deal with these three emotions."
The outer ring of the wheel is divided into six
quadrants or realms: heaven, demigods, human,
animal, hungry ghost and hell. But rather than
think of these realms as metaphysical locations
or even stages of karmic development, Samten said
he regards them as temporary states of mind.
"I look at it like one individual life,"
Samten said. "Sometimes we're so happy that
we're in heaven, and then an hour later we're
not doing well. We're so disappointed it's like
a hell."
Bay was in heaven when she met Namgyal in 1994
during a trip to Dharamsala, India with Samten.
Bay became fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism after
hearing the Dalai Lama speak at the San Francisco
Theological Seminary in San Anselmo in 1978. She
met Samten, who served as director Martin Scorsese's
religious technical advisor on the film "Kundun,"
when he visited George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch.
Bay has spent the last 29 years working as Lucas'
executive assistant.
Namgyal, 13 when Bay met her, was at the Tibetan
Children's Village in Dharamsala, an orphanage
established by the Dalai Lama. Namgyal's mother
died when she was an infant. Her father, a doctor
of Tibetan medicine, sent her to India so she
could receive a Tibetan education, which was impossible
under the Chinese regime.
"She was the girl of my dreams," said
Bay, who was unable to have a child during two
marriages. "She was a motherless child and
I was a childless mother. We had this instant
connection."
Namgyal's sudden death nine years later brought
her full circle.
"I was angry. I felt cheated. I felt like
this was some kind of karmic trick. I didn't deserve
this. She didn't deserve this," Bay said.
Bay said it was ultimately the central tenets
of Buddhism that allowed her to live with her
loss.
"I took it out of myself and opened my heart
to the suffering of others. I'm not the only person
who has lost a daughter," Bay said. "Death
is an inevitable consequence of life. We are all
going to lose people that we love - not to mention
our own ultimate death."
Samten said that even though Tibet continues
to exist under Chinese rule, the Tibet that was
his home has ceased to exist. He lives and teaches
now in Philadelphia.
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