Cascadilla Creek cuts through one of Ithaca, New York’s famously gorgeous gorges and then moseys through residential downtown. On its northern bank, as it passes under North Aurora Street, sits a large, slate-roofed, circa-1913 house. In the 1970s it was Teen Challenge, a faith-based drug treatment center. Then, it passed into the hands of the Sherman family (including this writer), who sold it to an architect, who sold it, indirectly to the Dalai Lama.
Since 1992, it has become the Namgyal Monastery, the home of the Dalai Lama in North America. In a neighborhood of beiges and grays, it is painted brilliantly and, at first, jarringly, in traditional temple colors: orange, maroon and yellow. Four monks live here at a time, usually for three-year shifts, conducting classes and leading meditations and retreats.
The Dalai Lama visited for the first time last October, delivering several lectures and blessing a new conference center being built a few miles away.
It was to Namgyal Ithaca that rock star Courtney Love also came in the summer of 1994 with the remains of her late husband, Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Seattle-based grunge band, Nirvana, in a raucous odyssey recounted in a February, 1996, Esquire piece. She wanted to do something about the terrible karma of his violent suicide. They had been occasional Buddhists. As she told Spin, “We prayed every night. We had some fucking dignity.”
Two handfuls of his ashes were packed along with her wedding dress in a small, teddy-bear-shaped knapsack. (Much of the rest of the ashes went on 40-performance tour with Love and her band, Hole.) As she was going through security at the airport in New York, an officer opened the knapsack and, as puffs of ash wafted out, he asked “What’s this?”
“That’s my husband,” she said.
By October, the monks had consecrated the ashes by forming them into about a dozen “tsatsas,” three-inch-tall, gold-painted cones, considered holy objects in Tibetan Buddhism. When Love failed to retrieve them, the monks boxed them and had them delivered to her at an undisclosed location. “We’re not a cemetery,” said a monastery spokesman. “We’re not the final stop. We’re no Graceland.”
The cones were eventually put inside a nirvana stupa, a sort of urn, made by Humboldt County, California woodworker and artist Henry Robertson. Its whereabouts remains a mystery to this day.
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