Zina Rachevsky at Kopan retreat circa 1971

My Tara Paintings, and how I know anything about Tibetan Buddhism

In the 1980's I lived in Woodstock, NY, practically in the shadow of the Tibetan Buddhist Monestery Karma Triyana Darmachakra (KTD). Although I was not a practitioner, I lived with one, which I thought gave me some in-law status.

In 1983 or 1984, my partner and I decided to go to India and Nepal. She wanted to see the Lamas and Tibetan Buddhist shrines and I was in search of information about my cousin Zina Rachevsky, who had been the first foreigner to study with Tibetan Lamas, (or second after Alexandra David Neel.)

Zina had always been somewhat of a mythical figure in my family. Born in 1930, she was the granddaughter of SW Straus, investment and underwriting banker in Chicago, who lost his huge fortune in the Depression. Zina was know to us as a wild child, but that would be a typical 195-'s description of an independent and curious woman. She spent much of her early adulthood seeking fame as an actress and became known as international socialite, knew the Beat Poets and eventually went to India and discovered Dharmal.

Zina Rachevsky, international playgirl, Focus Magazine 1953

Zena's father, we knew, claimed Russian nobility. It seems that his sister, Zinaida Rachevsky, who was not royalty, married Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich of Russia. They fled to Paris in 1918, just after the Russian revolution. While the Russian nobility link is a large part of Zina’s current mythology, in my family we were more interested in our Straus family - the Jewish side. Zina's mother, Harriet, was my mother, Polly Cowan's, first cousin. Harriet's father, SW Straus, and my maternal grandmother, Lena Straus Spiegel, were brother and sister.

Whether or not Zina actually thought of herself as a Russian Princess, it was a clever way of branding herself when she was creating a name for herself as an actress and a showgirl. I don't know if she continued to describe herself as a princess, or if the meme had just stuck with all her friends and aquaintances and became part of her public persona. Certainly, it made her memorable, and most likely reduced the amount of anti-Semitism that might have been an obstacle in those days.


I didn’t think much about Zina until I became interested in Tibetan Buddhism. She had visited us in New York only once, but I had no memory of her. But when I found that Zina had been involved with Lamas in India and Nepal soon after the Chinese invasion of Tibet, I knew it was something worth investigating.

In 1965 Zina was in Darjeeling and she asked, some say demanded, that Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa instruct her in Tibetan Buddhism. They had never taught a foreigner before, there was no precedent for it, but they agreed to teach her. Zina brought more and more European and American students to study with them. Soon she became involved in founding a retreat and study center at Kopan near Darjeeling.

White Tara, painting by Liza Cowan 2004
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, aprox 4'x6'
private collection

Excerpt from
Reincarnation:The Spanish Boy Whose Destiny was to be a Tibetan Lama by Vicki Mackenzie, Wisdom Publications 1996 :

"One day in 1965 an extraordinary thing happened. (to Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe) Into their room burst the most unlikely figure of all. A beautiful, young, blonde ‘princess’ of Russian descent, by the name of Zina Rachevsky. She was looking for the Domo Geshe Rinpoche, no doubt inspired by the romantic figure of Lama Govinda’s book, and was taken by mistake to Lama Zopa, who was also known as Domo Rinpoche ever since his stay at Dung-kar monastery in Tibet. Unaware of the mistaken identity she strode forward and boldly ask: “How can I receive peace and liberation?”

To say the two lamas were startled would be an understatement. No foreigner, especially the dreaded western ‘barbarian’ had ever entered their quarters before. No ‘barbarian’ had ever spoken to them like that before. And certainly, no ‘barbarian’ had ever talked of wanting enlightenment.

But then Zina Rachevsky was no ordinary person. Her life was, in its way, every bit as extraordinary as the two lamas’. Her father was a Russian prince, a Romanov who had fled the Russian Revolution, her mother an heiress, one of the richest women in the United States. Zina was brought up in Hollywood, and became a typical product of Tinsel Town – spoilt, precocious, insecure, attention-seeking, deeply unhappy. By the time she was a teenager she’d already hit the headlines more than once, not only for her entrée into the world of starlets, but also for her involvement in various drug scandals. She was gorgeous, curvy, sexy, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, wild and determined to live on the edge...

By the time she met Lama Yeshe she was, quite bluntly, jaded. The drugs, alcohol, late nights, rich living and too many sexual entanglements had taken their toll. To the lamas, she must have justified their countrymen’s every prejudice about the degenerate, unspiritual, western devil. And so for a while they said nothing, merely looked.

Was she real? Was she a fraud? Or was she, as Lama Yeshe suspected, someone very special? With his more mature wisdom he decided to test her. He explained to me: “I gave her some sort of answer, with my limited English, and after an hour she said she had to leave. To my surprise she asked if she could return the next day. I said “all right”. And she did come and asked more questions, and I gave teachings. For one week she made the journey by jeep to see us, and then asked us if we’d be prepared to go and visit her.”

Lama Yeshe hesitated for a moment. The step he was about to take was irrevocable. At this point Lama Zopa stepped in. With all the zeal of his youthful Bodhisattva’s heart he begged Lama Yeshe over and over again not to forsake this woman who had come seeking his help. Lama Yeshe still demurred. Did Lama Zopa know what he was asking? Could he be aware of the enormous responsibility that they were about to initiate and which would one day fall solely on his shoulders? Was he prepared for all that was on the verge of being brought into effect?

But the Bodhisattva promise, which they had both taken, is not written in sand, which the tide can wash away, but hewn out on rock and stands for all time. They both knew, of course, they could not refuse anyone sincerely seeking the truth. And so Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa set the wheel of Dharma turning for the West, and daily for nine months gave Zina Rachevsky the teachings she so earnestly desired. It must have been a mutually fascinating exchange. If Zina was intrigued by the holy men she had stumbled upon, they must have been transfixed by her. As Lama Yeshe told me, “She was very dissatisfied with everything! She said her life was empty and had no ‘taste’. She’d done everything in life, but still could find no satisfaction. I could see what she was saying. In comparison I had nothing – no country, no home, no money, no possessions, no family, and yet I had everything. With Zina, and later with other westerners, I began to enquire about their lifestyle. I realized that what Zina lacked was an understanding of herself, her inner life. She lacked an understanding of her own potential to be happy. She thought happiness came from without, but it does not, it comes from within.”

Zina had finally found the meaning that had been lacking in her frantically sad life. When her nine months of private tuition were over, the expiry of her visa forced her to return to Sri Lanka. She then bombarded the Dalai Lama with letters entreating him to give Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa permission to visit her in Sri Lanka. When permission was granted, Zina returned to India to escort her lama, but on the spur of the moment decided to go with them first to Dharamsala to try and get an audience with His Holiness personally. Once there she became convinced that her true vocation was to become a nun. Again Lama Yeshe stopped in his tracks. Having a western female disciple was one thing, having one with a shaved head and red robes was another. “I thought about it for a while,” he admitted, “then decided it was all right! It even seemed like a good idea. So I asked the Dalai Lama personally if he would ordain Zina.”

End of excerpt from Vicki Mackenzie.

Photo collage, photos by Liza Cowan 2005

Zina died in the early 1970's halfway through a meditation retreat, supposedly of peritonitis, and supposedly enlightened, leaving her young daughter to be raised by her Zina's mother, Harriet. Her son, Alex, was with his father Conrad Rooks, the filmmaker who directed the 1972 film, Siddhartha. Alex is now also a filmmaker.

I did my early research on Zina without the aid of the internet or google – they didn’t exist yet. I relied on information from my relatives. Now Google searches lead to variations on the theme of the Russian American princess seeking the teachings Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa, beginning the trickle that became a wave of Westerners studying Tibetan Buddhism. I find it fascinating that the Lamas and Buddhist students always describe her as a Russian Princess. I understand that Americans and Europeans are fascinated by royalty, but I am surprised that the mistaken royal identity clings to her, even after her death.

At Kopan, the retreat center she founded, I did find a couple of people willing to talk to me, but so reluctantly that I decided not to pursue it further. But she is now part of the foundational myth of the coming of Europeans to Tibetan Buddhism.

Harriet, Zina’s mother, whose family had, then lost, fabulous weath, died Los Angeles, having raised Zina’s daughter. Zina’s Russian dad - I don’t know what happened to him.

I'm sorry I never got to know my cousin Zina. I'm sure that this woman who went from sheltered rich Jewish Princess to actress/showgirl to Buddhist pioneer must have been amazing. I love how full her story is, how complex. It is said that she has reincarnated as a French tulku. I hope our paths cross someday. Stranger things have happened.

Lama Norlha Rinpoche and Liza Cowan, Darjeeling, 1984

The Lamas

In our travels we depended on the kindness of Lama Norlha Rinpoche, an esteemed teacher living near Woodstock, NY. We stayed with his family at his mother's house in Darjeeling. We arrived before he did, and our only address was a scrbbled note with the name of the street and the word, "petralpum" We aked our driver to go to Petrulpum, and after searching for about an hour we finally realized that it wasn't "petralpum" one of us had transcribed Lama saying Petrol Pump. The house was located next to the petrol (gasoline) station. It wasn't a gas station as we knew it, but it was the gasoline pump. So much for translating English into English.

Lama Norlha was always telling me I should do a three year retreat. I'm sure he was half joking, half not. While I loved meditating with him, there was just no way I was about to give up three years of my life for it. Maybe if I could have worn pink robes instead of maroon.

HE Kalu Rinpoche and Liza Cowan, 1985

In Nepal, we had the honor of meeting HE Kalu Rinpoche, the venerable, powerfu, kindly and ancient Lama. He was sick in bed, but graciously invited us into his bedroom to talk to him with the help of an interpreter.

I told him that I really didn't want to take refuge (a term for accepting Buddhism - not necessarily giving up your birth religion) because I could hear my Jewish Grandmother rolling over in her grave. Kalu Rinpoche pantomimed kissing a mezzuzah. I found that totally endearing. I then promply kneeled into his wooden soup bowl, which for some reason was next to me, and spilled it all over the floor. Then my grandmother really started screaming at me. "This nice old Tibetan Rabbi has taken time from his sick bed to talk to you and you spill his soup??? Clean it up!" So, there was nothing I could do but take refuge. It was lovely. Really.

Impromptu trek with HE Trangu Rinpoche, Nepal 1985

In Nepal spent time hanging out Trangu Rinpoche in Darjeeling. I know this sounds really casual, but it's true. When the Lamas came to the States they were surrounded with ceremony and devotees. But back home, they were incredibly welcoming and relaxed. I think we had tea with Trangu Rinpoche at his place several times. Just him and the two of us.

One day Trangu Rinpoche invited us to go on an expedition with him. This involved taking a long trip on a very dusty road in an old auto that broke down. We ended up joining a group of people in a rikkety old bus after hiking for miles. The bus was fine, and actually rather fun, but the roads were so dusty that we had to wrap our heads in our shawls just to be able to breathe. I have no memory of where we went.

Khenpo Khartar Rinpoche, Trangu Rinpoche, Bardor Tulku Rinpoche, and Liza Cowan, Woodstock, NY 1985

When Trangu Rinpoche came to Woodstock later that year we invited him and some of the other Lamas to lunch at our house. Khenpho Karthar Rinpoche was the abbot at KTD. Bardor Tulku Rinpoche was teaching there as well. Here we are on my deck. That's me in the Norma Kamali shirt with huge shoulder pads. Maybe I would actually have looked better in the maroon robes.

ACRYLIC ON PAPER
$250

WHITE TARA WITH GOLD AND BLACK

Tara's lotus flower has morphed into a kind of bowl of cherries. But her hairdo, well, its like the Buddhas knobs.

ACRYLIC ON PAPER, UNFRAMED
$250

TARA WITH CHERRIES

OK, this is the limit. This one I call the Helen Mirren Tara, and she really has morphed into not-tara. She's lost her third eye and her sacred crown has become more of a head wrap with buttons or something. And the lotus is definately a cherry concoction. But she has a kind of serene elegance that i like, sitting there in the light of the moon.