John Anthony Perks died peacefully at home surrounded by his family on January 31, 2025, at the age of 90. For those who appreciate auspicious coincidence, this was Imbolc, or St Brigid’s Day, in Ireland. John was a deeply spiritual person with a love of utopian experimental communities and of constant creative reinvention. He was a charismatic dreamer with a fiery temper and a wicked sense of humor. A romantic who loved ceremonies, especially weddings, he managed seven of his own. He never met a costume or an adventure he didn’t like. He loved flags, boats, whiskey and animals, especially his last dog, a feisty pug named Viva. He was an excellent cook who almost always woke up cheerful, and even up into his eighties he could build anything. He thought of himself as a tribal person, tracing his lineage back to the Celts.
John was born on March 13, 1934, in Sidcup, England. Though Sidcup is now a southern neighborhood of London, it was then countryside, and during World War II, John was encouraged by his Wiccan mother to play alone in the woods as a sort of haven from Nazi threat. There, John’s lifelong love of animals, trees and using his imagination to invent stories began. When Sidcup was eventually evacuated, John was sent first to Norfolk, and then to Cornwall, as part of an attempt to protect children from the nightly bombing raids but was later returned to Sidcup where he was knocked off his bike by a buzz bomb which punctured an eardrum. The terror and violence of those war years marked him for the rest of his life.
After the war, John went to work as a waiter at the age of fourteen. The following year, he decided he would either join the Merchant Marines or move to America, where his mother and two sisters had relocated. When his travel visa arrived before his Merchant Marines papers, his decision was made. He took a transatlantic voyage on the SS America from Southampton to New York, leaving March 10, 1950, and arriving three days later, on his 16th birthday.
John’s adventures in the U.S. included stints as a cowboy, a butcher, a teacher, a painter, a sailor, and a butler to the rich and famous. One of his biggest projects was co-founding the Highland Community School on 600 acres in Paradox, NY, a therapeutic community for struggling adolescents. The school offered an alternative approach to education including working on a farm and many boating adventures on the “high seas” of Lake George.
A second passion project began when he met his Buddhist teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in Vermont, and followed him to Boulder, CO where he helped establish Rinpoche’s home, Kalapa Court. This phase of John’s life ended when his teacher sent him away with the suggestion that he become a servant. John tells his own story of personal transformation best in his book, The Mahasiddha and His Idiot Servant.
John came to believe that all beings are our teachers. Banishment was a devastating blow, but one that he would later consider to be among the most important teachings he’d received. Inspired by his formal teachers, including the 16th Karmapa and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche—in addition to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—John repaid his debt of learning by founding the lineage of Celtic Buddhism. He began in Saxtons River, VT, where he simply meditated by himself and was later joined by two friends: Bill Burns, a former teacher from the Highland Community School, and his wife, Peg Junge, who coincidentally had relocated near to John. Such were the auspicious coincidences that were common in John’s life. John later founded the AnáDaire Celtic Buddhist Center in Saxtons River with the help of his wife Julia. With Julia, John was finally able to settle down, and they were married for 16 years. They took good care of each other and of their pugs and loved traveling together. Their final trip to Arizona took place just a few months before he died.
From 1998 on, John lived in the Saxtons River area, apart from a two-year hiatus in Ireland. In addition to being a teacher, giving talks at AnáDaire and hosting students at the Center, John was a friend, neighbor and well-loved community member. Letters and emails to him at the end of his life attest to the man and his evolutionary journey. He was described variously as a character, a rogue, a rascal, outrageous, warm, loving, engaging, wise, clairvoyant, nature-loving.
One of John’s greatest sources of pride were his six children, Micah, Bekah, Kathleen, Sophie, Tillie, and Percy, many of whom inherited his creativity, sense of humor and his thick ankles. He had the blessing of getting to know his children more fully later in life and took every opportunity to talk about these “wonderful people,” describing their work and where they lived, adding quickly that their mothers deserved all the credit.
If you are interested in knowing more about John’s life, Celtic Buddhism and the continuing work of some of his students, please visit: www.celticbuddhism.org. Tributes to John can also be found on: The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche: https://www.chronicleproject.com/the-passing-of-john-perks/
John and I were good friends since 1965. I could write many chapters of the stories and adventures we shared. In processing his passing I composed a musical piece to express some of what I’m not not capable of expressing in words. It’s called: Dissolving into Air. My musical friend, John Schilling, plays lead guitar.
Bill Burns
To Johnny Seonaidh, Dharma Brother, Siddha from Sidcup
Preamble: Several years in the Court, with Rinpoche, Jeannie, Sophie and a taste of tiny Tillie in Maitland, Nova Scotia; then a year or so in Halifax, there at the end; then a year or two in Vermont with a spicy siddha interlude in Michigan. When we first met again in Vermont, after decades apart though occasionally corresponding, as I gazed into your old familiar Kalapa Court eyes, I saw Rinpoche gazing back at me, then all three of us laughed in mutual recognition. ‘We shall grow old together, Johnny’ wrote the Vidyadhara long ago; and so it came to be.
So many hours, meals, drinks, days and months together. Words fail when considering your impact, imagination, humour, playfulness, discipline, insight, boldness, generosity, passion, fearlessness, wisdom, service and kindness. And yet I must try, for Julia has asked. Spontaneously then, and in memory of my best and dearest Dharma Brother – for so you often called me - off we go:
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Johnny walks with the Siddhas
With the old gods like antlered Cernunnos, erstwhile Stag and dastardly Dung Beetle,
With the musing, sneaky dakinis of the underworld, the overworld, the dream world,
With the timeless gurus:
Lord of Space Dingo Khyentze, whose gestures effortlessly lassoed galaxies
King of Mind, the Gyalwa Karmapa, whose every mantra beaded together majesty and modernity,
Chögyi Gyatso, servant chum of profoundly poetic unreal realities, the master, the lover, the friend, the teacher, the leader, the trickster, the ultimate Golden Sun of Glorious Being....
So Johnny: now you’re up there, in the Refuge Tree where you belong,
Rubbing elbows with your betters, all together now,
Lords of space, merry of mind
Fresh and majestic, cockney and cuckold
Sacred and naughty, cook and housekeeper
Butler and footman, thief and ravisher
Comic and craftsman, Lord and Lady...
Treading the luminous realms of the waking-body dreamer
Imagination dripping like summer rain from grateful leaves of generous spontaneity
Johnny is walking, Johnny is treading, Johnny is soaring, Johnny is flying
Johnny is serving his beloved guru, Chögyi the Chakravartin
Lord of the Three Times, the Ten Times Table,
Conqueror of the American 70’s
Hero of here and back again
So sweet - sweeter than any port in a storm or poured in crystal
So precise - cutting the sandwich just so, placing the pin in particularly perfect position
So gallant - salute all a-quiver, angle acutely cutting through cumbersome cavalry
Cannons a-blazing, sabres rattling, home into harbour, dead-on reckoning,
Beat into stiff breeze, lunge on a broad reach, relax on a run
Easy swales of a following sea,
Gleaming in moonlight the fulsome fool moon of Purnachandra,
Smiling and laughing, dancing and twirling,
Tickling your moustache Johnny, pinching you to dance a jig again,
Summon Gilkerson’s Pipes again
Tease Gimian’s temper again, smash the glass against the wall in the Court
Arouse Lady Diana’s disapproval again,
Rail against the bored bureaucrats in the PIC building
Shock the locals in Maitland at The Great Ship Inn
Scandalize the kinky Madames in Manhattan, slaves to outrageous fortunes,
Ransack the dreams of the war-wounded in Sidcup
Steal once again for your mother in suburban bardos...
Major to this, Major to that, Major to Nelson, Major to Montgomery
Waltz with the Mahasiddhas Johnny, waltzing forever
All eighty four of them, all of them plunder
All of them pirates, all of them plenty
All of them weaving their Dream Body splendour
All of them bowing, all of them laughing,
All of them joyful, all of them waiting,
Waiting for you Johnny, Butler and Master,
Slave, Servant, Admiral, Lord of all Laughter,
The Siddhas all bow to you, Siddha from Sidcup,
Go now and play with them, lightning and thunder
Go now and trick them with Great British Humour,
Go now with Chögyi your friend now forever...
But never forget us, dear Johnny – No! No!
Always remember us here down below
And send us your blessings in sunshine and rain
Send us your blessings in heartache and pain
Send us your wisdom, your daughters, your wives
Send us your marvellous happenstance life.
Long may you live in our hearts old companion
Long may you live in our hearts old companion
Long may you live in our hearts old companion.
The Venerable Sir Ashley Playfair-Howes
Baron of Bras D’Or, Lord of the Isles
Your unworthy Dharma Heir.
Postscript:
The waking world never caught you, Johnny, not for an instant so no doubt the bardos didn’t either; one day, may the net of your lineage catch the vessel of your next rebirth – though you are already reborn, I trow, and beyond our imagining