Tibetan Buddhist Altar » The Spiritual Path

With Joyful Expectancy

Jetsunma — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:30:40 +0000

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

It’s easy to hear Dharma, if you have the merit. It’s easy to keep a record of how many teachers we have sat in the presence of. It is much harder to change, to remain where we are and to deepen. It is harder still to rely on the advice of our Spiritual Master rather than on our own prideful, rigid, ordinary ideas.

The path of Dharma must renew for us a profound, living presence in our lives. It should never become stale or stiff, nor should we allow our minds to become hard, rigid or prideful. We should hold our hearts and minds in a confident posture of trembling, joyful expectancy. Then the path becomes our treasure, our food, our refuge. Then, gradually, we transform into that most precious jewel, the aspirant who actually gives rise to the Bodhicitta, who makes love and compassion a living presence in the world. This is the answer to all our longing.

May the power and potency of Dharma fill your lives. May virtue prevail. May compassion be born in our hearts and devotion nourish our minds, pouring forth to all sentient beings who remain in samsara. May they be liberated from the very causes of suffering. And may it be soon; may it be today. May samsara be emptied. Lord Guru, of the suffering of sentient beings, there has been enough. I dedicate all virtue I have accomplished, in this and every other lifetime, past, present and future, to this end.

The Happiness Machine

Jetsunma — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:30:06 +0000

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo from The Spiritual Path

Sometimes the ordained have problems with desire. When you take on robes, it doesn’t mean that desire ceases. Why not make that desire meaningful? You can offer desire to the Three Precious Jewels. It’s not a big secret that you’re feeling it. Use it as an offering! It is the most profound and auspicious offering. Of course, this is true for lay people as well. All the ego-clinging that you participate in can be offered. But what do you do instead? How many precious minutes do you waste? You sit there and think about how profound your understanding of the Dharma is, and you juggle your insights in the air. Aren’t you just continuing the habitual tendency of perceiving phenomenal reality according to you? You use your insights to increase your ego-clinging. Maybe you’re doing it right now, contriving your own version of the insight you think I want you to have. What you are not doing is offering your perception to the Three Precious Jewels. You aren’t, are you? You forgot. With this practice, you can break through the seduction of phenomenal existence. It is a way to break the cycle of desire and ego inflation. It is a way to awaken to the Nature. If you did that and nothing else, you would be an excellent practitioner, and you would achieve the auspicious result.

How can you break the cycle? If you remember just three times during the course of one day, three minutes of generosity, that’s a start. If you lose it after a minute, don’t give up. Keep climbing back on. When you fall off the horse, climb back on. That’s how you establish generosity in your mind. Write yourself a note. Put it on all your favorite places: your mirror, refrigerator, CD player. Whenever you turn on your CD player, you’ll remember to offer the experience of sound. A little at a time, day by day, you can have that experience. I have had the experience of going for a walk and doing that for an extended period of time. Each time I sensed the experience of perception, I would turn it over immediately, turn it over.

Your habit is to take a perception, hold on to it, and make something. Have you noticed that? But you can come between that moment of perceptual experience and making something. It’s tricky, and you have to practice it, but you can learn to put a little space in there. And you can use that space to turn it over, to dedicate it, to offer it. You can develop a repeatable experience. It can even become automatic. Just remember: the moment you experience your own perception, avoid forming it into a superstructure that enhances your ego. Turn it over, turn it over, offer it. What will happen? Your whole personality will change. Your behavior will change. It will have to change—because your behavior has been based on desire and on inflating your ego. Not only that, but if you engage in this kind of practice for an extended period, you can have something like a blissful experience. I say this with dread in my heart because I know what’s going to happen. You’ll go for a walk. You’ll put some minimal effort into this practice, and you’ll contrive for yourself an amazing, blissful experience. And then you’ll seize upon that experience and have a more meaningful self because of it. Don’t do that! Just engage in the practice and continually make that offering. You’ll find there’s a happiness that comes with it. There’s a joy, a spontaneous feeling of joy. But don’t cling to it. The minute you see yourself sensing the feeling, you’ve got to turn that over too. You simply make an offering. That experience of joy is an offering. See all your connections with the world through the five senses as a kapala filled with precious jewels. But don’t contrive something out of it. Instead, find the subtle moment right before the experience. Then, once you find it, simply use that moment to make the offering.

I hope all this is helpful to you. I hope you will use it. This is the kind of teaching that can change your life. It can change everything about your practice. I don’t think it is arrogant to say that. It is my personal experience. This practice, I think, has contributed more to my well-being than anything, even though, if I tried, I could find reasons to be unhappy. But for me, this practice has been like a happiness machine. I feel it has deepened my mind. I feel it has made my mind more spacious, more relaxed, more peaceful. I feel it has created a lot of merit. I visualize an altar in my mind at which I can constantly make offerings. You should think of your consciousness as an altar—and all phenomenal experience as the offering. The instant you decide that you must have the best apples, make those apples count for something. Offer them and everything that is delicious and beautiful and satisfying. Offer as well all experience, in its purest form. Dedicate the value of that offering to the end of suffering for all sentient beings. You have entered the path of ultimate happiness.

True Purity

Jetsunma — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:29:22 +0000

Vajrasattva

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Let’s say you have become satisfied with an idea of what a practitioner should be. You are quiet, meek, gentle, and ever so passive. You attempt to be pure by never adorning your face, hair or body. You do what you think is right. Fine. But what if you stop there? What if you allow days, weeks, years, your whole life to pass by with no true sense of the need to eradicate hatred, greed and ignorance from your mindstream? What if you have no real understanding of the emptiness of phenomena? No true perception of the nature of mind? What have you really accomplished? What is yours to carry with you? How will you enter the afterlife state, the bardo? Will you not see as you have always seen? Will you not see the events within the bardo state as external phenomena? Will you not be excited, afraid? Will you not still be lost in the delusion of self and other?

On the Vajrayana path, true purity, true virtue is central and precious. Even one moment of true perception of the nature of mind is the only conceivable virtue. If you merely live according to the rules, you will definitely have merit. But in terms of the value of your own nature, your own mind, you will not have the purification that leads to true perception. The Vajrayana path is unique in its perspective on this. It adopts the morality and rules of the Hinayana path, as well as the Mahayana perspective of compassion and purity, yet it goes further into the understanding that true perception is the thing of value—the diamond.

The goal of the Vajrayana path is to realize the nature of mind. The nature of mind is absolute compassion. At that primordial-wisdom level, there is no good or bad. There is clear, uncontrived, pure, self-luminous nature. Primordial mind is unborn, yet perfectly complete. It is unmarked, un-measured by time or space. It is self-arising. True virtue is not a way of acting. Nor is it a way of thinking—as most people understand thought. There is only one real virtue: the realization of primordial mind. Naturally arising within that realization is a deep and abiding compassion—a compassion that is capable of manifesting in any form necessary in order to bring true benefit to beings.

Please understand that primordial mind itself is not filled with hatred, greed and ignorance. This is simply not possible. The mind is forever pure. It is unchanging. It cannot be defiled in any way. What then is the problem? Where is the defilement? Not in mind itself, but in perception. The real value of practicing on the Vajrayana path is that you are involved in a system by means of which your mind can arise with all the pure qualities of the Buddha. Think, for instance, of Buddha Vajrasattva. This is the practice of a Buddha who is the perfect union of wisdom and compassion. He represents that phase of mind as it first moves into manifestation from the primordial level. The pristine connection between the primordial nature of mind and its transition into an activity phase is not separate from that basic nature.

Bring the Love

Jetsunma — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:30:03 +0000

Thousand Arm Avalokiteshvara Mandala

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

All Dharma, your practice, your teachers, and everything you have ever encountered that has brought you closer to enlightenment—is only one thing: a manifestation or an emanation of the enlightened, compassionate intention of the Buddha. That is why this path appears and why we are able to practice Dharma. If you wish to follow this path, abandon your drunken, compulsive need to be right, approved of, admired. You must rely on the Buddha’s great intention. And after you finally arise in the awareness of your own primordial-wisdom nature, you will of necessity appear again and again to benefit beings. For it is the nature of that state to do so. That pristine state appears in an emanation phase—a spontaneous, natural movement that we may call love.

Who stops the love? You do. Every moment you believe that you are inherently real, you stop loving. Every moment you focus on your “self” and its needs, you stop loving. As your churning desire compulsively creates a deluge of thoughts, you stop loving. As long as you hold on to a “self” and the idea of its eternal existence, you will never be anything but a cheap imitation of the supremely awakened mind. I asked a wonderful yogini in Nepal, “What would you say to women in America who are practicing?” She said, “Well, this applies to everyone, but especially to women. Have courage.” Your practice is meaningless—it amounts to nothing—unless you have courage. You must be strong. You must not let anything stop you. With that fearlessness, you can break through the lethargy in your life; you can break through the barriers that keep you from practicing sincerely; you can even break through the old ideas that keep you mired in garbage. You can understand that by believing in a surviving, eternal ego, you are following a fool off a cliff.

Western Baggage and Eastern Philosophy

Jetsunma — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:30:40 +0000

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

As human beings, we avoid looking deeply at our ingrained habits and beliefs. We avoid testing them for the qualities needed to develop properly on the Vajrayana path. It’s easier to “go with the flow.” We dislike challenging ourselves. Most of all, we dislike change. We are somehow more comfortable with remnants of our old beliefs, translated into Dharma terminology.

Eastern philosophy is difficult for Westerners to understand. There are so many major differences, including the basic premise and the value system. Though the various motivations for practice set forth by the Buddha are universally true, people tend to select what resonates most with what they learned while growing up. Your culture strongly influences your reasons for practicing Dharma—and how you under-stand it. Those whose needs are generally satisfied react very differently from people who have seen war, suffering, and famine. The latter tend to hang on to Dharma for dear life. But many Dharma-practicing Westerners complacently think: “If I can just get another precious human rebirth, I’ll be okay.”

Not so for those who have seen intense suffering. They are apt to think: “I want out. I want my mind to be free of the causes of suffering. I am sick of revolving helplessly on this wheel. I’m tired of watching my loved ones go hungry and die young.” When you have seen war, you know that death could be just a moment away. But we Westerners rely on medical marvels. We have faith that if someone can just get us to the hospital in time, we will be saved.

The great blessing here in the United States is that many people have a strong karmic relationship with compassion. Thus, I talk more about compassion than about suffering. But it may not be enough to practice Dharma because you feel a sense of mission and purpose—however pure your intention might be. That is not the same as hanging on to Dharma for dear life. If you have not understood in the depths of your being how impermanent this life is, if you have not really understood the terrible prospect of revolving endlessly in cyclic existence—you tend to be much more casual in your attitude toward practice. You may not challenge yourself to do your best.

Westerners need a constant shot of inspiration. We seek it out. We eat it like candy, and we love it! But just like candy, it soon lets us down. And even if we practice with the intention to help sentient beings, there is still a catch: our practice gives us a sense of identity. Right now, your sense of identity determines why you live, what you do, what is important to you. But it also makes you a traveler who is standing still. We can move very fast in our practice and yet remain quite stiff inside. If we practice because we want to be a good person who helps others, we become comfortable with that identity. We do not feel the urgency of someone living with the constant threat of being bombed—or someone who has known hopeless hunger.

We may adopt some new ideas, but our beliefs are basically unchanged. And so is our predicament. We still believe that we will exist as we are forever, if not in the same body, then with the same consciousness. We hope to attain the goal of realization as ourselves. We believe we can keep ourselves intact, and then, we will somehow appear in a celestial form in order to benefit beings. As to what we will actually do, we vaguely envision bringing love and light to the world, the bounty of our great wisdom. And to do that, we will continue to exist in some way that is recognizable to us.

We have now come to a delicate but crucial distinction, and we must tread carefully. We pray to retain awareness throughout the process of death—so that during the bardo transference we can achieve realization or, at least, rebirth in a most fortunate way. We also want to come back in an emanation form in order to benefit beings. However, we may not yet have really challenged our ideas of foreverness and sameness. That is, we haven’t given up on ego, on surviving. This is a product of our culture. Christians aspire to survive death and go to heaven. A Buddhist, however, hopes to remain awake and not faint during the time of transference in the bardo state, but understands that what remains is not the self or the ego: it is awareness itself, the pure, essential mind-nature, unobscured, un-hindered by dirty winds and channels. It is not the natural state of you, the person you are right now. If you are hoping that this “you” will remain intact, you have a different religion programmed into your brain. The correct goal is not to survive in an eternalistic way, reaching a heaven-like Dewachen and then returning as a Buddhist angel to help people.

When you pray for others, do you wish for all sentient beings to know love and light? As Buddhists, we can no longer have this as our prayer. Why? When you do that, you are wishing for sentient beings to remain intact forever, revolving in a state of impermanence. This is very different from praying that the causes for suffering will be erased from their minds, that they will realize the primordial-wisdom state.

What should you as a Buddhist hope for? That when you enter into the bardo, or into your prayers, or even into the next moment, you will instantly come to know the emptiness of all phenomena, the emptiness of self-nature. Self-nature is like a puffball. You should pray to see it for what it is: poof! Just like that. You should pray with all your heart to realize the primordial, natural, pure view—the Nature which is free of all concepts, all mind-chatter. That Nature miraculously survives beneath all the garbage we pile on top of it. That Nature is pure, all pervasive, with neither beginning nor end. When you attain that view, form and formless are seen to be the same, and self is only luminosity.

Merit & the Karma of Happiness

Jetsunma — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:30:26 +0000

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

You are able to practice because you had the karma to receive teachings. Merit has come to the surface of your mind; good karma is ripening. But linked with some of this ripening merit are some bubbles of not-so-good karma. So what happens? You sit down with the intention to practice, but now you’re just too tired. You start to fall asleep. Or you decide that you need to do some other things. You externalize what you think are the causes for your inability to practice. Maybe you even begin to doubt that you’re happy in the Dharma. You wish you were surfing in California, and this thought is like a little rat, gnawing in your head. It gnaws at you slowly and steadily.

You need to understand that good karma is ripening, but some negative karma is linked to it. Embedded in your mindstream is some non-virtuous activity associated with the intention to practice. Now you have repeated that pattern, in seed form, and it will ripen in the future. Sometime in the future, you will again sit down with the intention to practice, and you won’t be able to do it. So the sensible thing to do is to persevere, to push through as well as you can. Understand that your tiredness, sleepiness, and other excuses have no basis. They are puffballs.

When you find yourself making excuses why you are unable to practice, why you don’t really want to hear the teachings, the best thing to do is to break through by accumulating merit. By doing virtuous things. Study Dharma. Pray. Practice kindness and generosity. Meditate. Contemplate the teachings. Try to understand them more deeply. Be attentive. Make offerings. Repeat the Seven Line Prayer many times. Repeated with faith, it is an antidote that can end all your suffering. It can, the teaching says, lead to enlightenment. All these things are ways to accumulate merit. You must understand how merit (and lack of it) works, or you will have a difficult time maintaining potency on the Path. It will even be difficult, on an ordinary level, to have a good life. For you won’t have any way to understand what is happening to you. You will always blame external things, other people. It is true that when you encounter misfortune, other people are usually involved, and you may well have some mixed karma with those people. But the karma arises within your own mindstream; it isn’t somewhere outside.

Pull out of your addiction to reaction. Think of your mind as something like a mechanism, and you yourself as a mechanic. Understand that you can work with its levers, pulleys, and gears. To most people, their own minds are a mystery, a complete mystery. And they search for someone who can understand them.

What should you do? Persevere in your practice. What else? Create more merit. The big mystery of “me” is solved. Almost reluctantly, too, because it’s so lovely to remain a mystery. It’s so pleasant to think that there is something mysterious, special, and unique about us. How often we try to obtain something that seems just out of reach. Or we have it in our hands, and it slips away. What is going on here? Lack of merit, of course. And yet we keep on reaching and grabbing and forcing, all in vain. Sometimes we think we have made something happen by forcing it. And yet, we have merely rearranged our karma. The basic problem remains unsolved. Suppose you want a new car, but the cost is just out of reach. Both merit and lack are coming to the surface. Even if you contrive to get the car, you will still have, ripening, some non-virtue associated with lack. That lack will always show up somewhere—with the car itself, or in your relationships, your health, or in missed opportunities. So the key, whenever you lack something, is to accumulate merit.

Some people are unaware that it takes merit to be happy. Have you ever noticed that some people just seem to be happy, no matter what? And others … well, happiness seems to elude them. And it’s because there is no karma of happiness, no karma of having made others happy, ripening in their minds. You can’t even lighten them up with a joke. They just don’t have any happy bubbles ripening to the surface. “How are you today?” you ask them. “Not so good,” they reply. “Umm … Nothing seems to go right.” But if we haven’t got the karma for happiness, whose fault is that? Who did it to us? Someone else? No, but it’s a problem we can fix. The problem is within our own minds. We can create the karma of happiness by creating merit.

Like Vibes With Like

Jetsunma — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:30:08 +0000

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Let’s say that your immediate family consists of four people, so you have a particular karma with three others. Those three all have both negative and positive karmic seeds coming to the surface, just as you do. When you four came together, you did so because certain karma was ripening. You could not marry; a child could not be born to you, unless that particular karma was ripening in your mindstream, and in someone else’s. When this karma comes together, it has a kind of interactive characteristic. Like tends to attract or “vibe with” like.

Perhaps you have some horrible negative karma associated with cruelty to animals. You may have a child, or there may be someone else in your family, who has a similar negative karma. Though you won’t understand why, it is likely that something will happen to reinforce the catalyzing effect of your relationship. For instance, you might get a dog that both of you abuse. Or you might develop a terrible animosity toward animals that you would not have experienced so overwhelmingly, if you had not been with that particular person. In your past, you also have karma of being kind to animals. And had you come together with a person with strong kind-to-animals karma, that relationship might have catalyzed something completely different. Let’s say that you have a period of intense anger: the karma of anger is coming to the surface. If you let yourself fall into that anger, really wallow in it, then you will tend to ripen still more anger from the deeper past, and those bubbles will continue to come forward. On a superficial level, the anger will seem to feed on itself. You will feel compelled to be angry.

But suppose you do everything you can to overcome your anger. Though angry at someone, you tell yourself: “This person is suffering just as all sentient beings are, and doesn’t really mean to act that way.” If you truly try to circumvent the anger by reasoning it out, what will happen? Instead of having more anger ripen and come forward, you will ripen a different kind of karma. Perhaps the karma of clear thought. Basically, you can prevent future ripenings of negative karma by taking hold of yourself at any given point. You have a precious human rebirth; you have the Dharma; and you can think logically. You are able to choose how to cope with any anger that arises.

When some people have an unpleasant feeling, such as anger, hatred, or grief, they habitually cover it over. If they become angry, for example, they say, “I feel only love.” Or: “There is only love.” This is like slapping a Band-Aid on an ulcer, which only continues to ripen and grow deeper. By plastering one thought on top of another, you actually link them together. And what happens? Either your anger and hatred will remain inflamed on an underlying level (a frequent result), or you may ripen the karma of delusion. Your mind will be very unclear. Those who use such methods over a long period of time become deeply set in delusion. It seems as if they have gone somewhere else, and one is tempted to ask, “Are you still in there? Anybody home?” There are just too many layers of Band-Aids. What you need is to examine the contents of your mindstream. And begin to view your own mind as something you can work with, something you can take responsibility for.

Dharmakaya

Jetsunma — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:30:10 +0000

Guru Rinpoche Rainbow Body

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

It is not enough to visualize the form of a teacher or lama, thinking that you see only a man or a woman. Such a shallow perception does not put you in touch with what is truly happening. In fact, it causes virtually all the value and function of the lama to be lost to you. Guru Rinpoche comes to us as a direct emanation of the Dharmakaya Buddha, Amitabha. The nature of Amitabha is non-dual. The Dharmakaya is clear, crystalline, uncontrived. It is mind as it is—without limitation or conceptualization of any kind.

This is difficult to understand because we have never had a direct experience of our essential nature. Even our moments of deepest meditation—of what we might call Samadhi—are merely intermediate stages, not to be misconstrued as the ultimate, true realization that occurs when one reaches liberation from all conceptualization. The nature of mind is much like a crystal: clear and uncontrived. It has no sense of self and other. Its nature is such that it can reflect all forms of emanation, and there is nothing that is separate from that all-pervading mind. From that nature, Guru Rinpoche is born. Guru Rinpoche can be understood as a form of the Dharmakaya that is visible to our eyes. He can also be understood, more correctly, as the result of the all-pervading compassion of that mind. If it were possible for the Dharmakaya to reveal itself in some form, that form would be, and is, Guru Rinpoche.

The nature of Dharmakaya is compassion, but not as we usually think of it. Humans generally understand compassion to be directed toward a certain object, for example: “I feel compassion for you.” In our language, that means, “I am sorry for you.” True compassion, in the nature of mind—in Dharmakaya—is quite different. It is objectless. It is not directed toward any specific other, and thus it is all pervading. Why is it not directed toward any specific other? Because in the nature of true mind there is no other. If this all-pervading nature, in its non-dual reality, considers that there is no other, then it must fully embrace and never keep itself away from any object. That is true compassion because it is unconditional.

Such compassion cannot be earned or bought; nor can it be destroyed. It is the nature of the primordial mind. There is nothing you can do to distance yourself from this mind, which is your true nature. You can cover it up by developing thoughts of duality, contrivance, and judgment. You can create so much non-virtue that you fail to perceive that nature, but you cannot distance yourself from it. It is still your nature, unaltered and indestructible. That which is seemingly far away is therefore quite close; in fact, it is non-dual with all that you are.

Your Guru

Jetsunma — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:30:50 +0000

Ven Gyaltrul Rinpoche

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

In Vajrayana Buddhism, the Teacher is the cornerstone of all practice. The Teacher is everything—the underlying strength and the means by which transmission and understanding occur.

Let us compare the Teacher’s function with the function of various other objects of refuge. All people—not just Buddhists—have such objects. Try for a moment to determine your own. If you think that the accumulation of material wealth is the way to happiness, money has become your guru. The material things you treasure are your guru. If, on the other hand, you choose the beer-and-sports routine, watching ESPN every night until you fall asleep, you have accepted the TV as your guru. It pacifies you. It makes you temporarily happy. You betray yourself: these things are unreliable, impermanent, and deceptive. Yet you put your trust and faith in them. Nothing in our impermanent realm of phenomenal existence can lead to happiness. Nothing—even if it seems ideal, like the perfect job or the perfect relationship in a perfect split-level, with 2.5 perfect children surrounded by a perfect white picket fence. At the moment of death, you are alone.

According to Buddhist teaching, there is a lasting happiness: enlightenment. It is the only end to all forms of suffering, including impermanence. Enlightenment cannot be tainted; it cannot be eaten by moths. It cannot rust; it cannot be destroyed. Enlightenment is the true source of refuge, the only thing that will not allow you to be betrayed. True happiness cannot be taken away. It is permanent and unchanging—the steadfast, stable reality of the enlightened mind. When you achieve enlightenment, what is revealed is your own primordial-wisdom nature. Some people think that they must give birth to enlightenment or that they have to find it. Actually, the primordial-wisdom nature has never left you, nor is it unborn. It remains in the way that a crystal is still a crystal, even though covered by dirt and mud.

Once you accept enlightenment as your goal, you should understand that the Guru is someone who can get you there. What should you look for in a Guru? A Teacher should not be seeking power or personal gain. Your Guru should have profound compassion, profound awareness. Most important, your Teacher should be able to transmit to you a true path. Suppose you go to a psychiatrist who helps you to be happier, more effective. This is very useful, but it is only a temporary way to cope, whereas the Guru offers you supreme enlightenment. This has nothing to do with coping. In fact, it has nothing to do with satisfying the ego.

Do not be fooled by charisma, saying: “I can tell by my feelings. This is the Teacher for me!” Instead, ask: Does this person teach a path that has been proven, time and time again, to stabilize the mind to the extent that miraculous activity can occur? Does this Teacher offer a technology that can stabilize the mind during the death experience? Can this technology result in miraculous signs at the time of passing? Are there indications that others have had success with this path and can now return in an emanation form in order to benefit beings? Look at the people who have practiced before you. Look at their successes or failures. Examine the history of the path, including the accounts of any enlightenment it has produced. At their passing, practitioners may produce miraculous signs: rainless rainbows, sweet scents, the transformation of the body into a rainbow of light, leaving only the hair and nails, the mysterious formation of relics or other unusual substances. On the Vajrayana path, such miraculous signs have been witnessed and recorded by many. People have seen the rainbow body; they have smelled the sweet scents; they have seen these extraordinary events.

The Buddha Himself said that we should use logic in choosing a Teacher or a path. After that, however, you begin to rely on the Teacher for everything. Why? Because you make a god out of your Teacher? Do you lose your brains and become a drone or a bliss ninny? Not at all. We Americans like to think we are unique, important, the best in the world. We think that to be happy, we must develop our individuality, so the idea of following a Guru is unappealing. But a teacher should not be chosen with blind faith or rampant emotion. You should exercise both intelligence and surrender. They are not in conflict. They can coexist very comfortably within the same mind, the same heart.

Note that you do not surrender to a person. It is not about a person. Your Teacher represents the door to liberation, the path that leads to enlightenment. Your relationship with the Guru is the most precious of all relationships. This is you talking to you—and finding out that you are not you at all. This is a glimpse, a taste, of true nature. At last we have arrived at the correct way to understand the Teacher.

Cultivate the precious relationship with your Guru through devotion. Make sure, however, that it really is devotion—not merely the kow-towing to a physical being. Devotion is an understanding of refuge, an understanding of your goal, plus the courage to walk through the door you have chosen. Choose only once, and choose correctly. From then on, allow yourself the grace to love deeply and gently.

Developing Pure View

Jetsunma — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:30:54 +0000

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Students who are flirting with, considering, or entering the path may become confused by the term “pure view.” Why? Because they register the ordinary meaning of these words, unaware that they will understand more later. If at this moment we were able to awaken in the primordial wisdom state, if we were somehow able to move into Lord Buddha’s posture of being awake to that nature, pure view would be instantly established. When we first come to the path, we are excited to have found something precious. It’s like waking up on Christmas morning and discovering a gift. We realize that Dharma provides tools we didn’t have before, deeper ways to understand. We realize that we are going to be let in on a vast secret…Something that will enrich our lives, change our lives.

We enter a romantic period. We fall in love. It’s quite normal: in some ways, it is helpful. Falling in love with a person enables you to see that person’s best qualities. You become open to that person and the same thing happens with Dharma. You become receptive. Some students fall in love with the very idea of being on a path, being part of a group experience, part of something that moves together as one body, and with the idea of having a teacher. Some students fall in love with the exotic things they encounter in their Dharma practice. “Hey, this temple looks like Nepal or something! It’ll be cool to bring my friends!” Silly and superficial as this sounds, it is absolutely normal when you first come to the path. It is also normal to begin “The Great Adventure Of Imitation.” Walking the Dharma walk, talking the Dharma talk. Trying to look serenely pure upon hearing the term “pure view.” Periodically rolling the eyes skyward to appear saintly. As we try to act in a way that we think is pure, we approach Dharma externally. Materialistically. Wait! How can approaching Dharma be materialistic? Isn’t it a religion of renunciation? Unfortunately, it is very possible to practice materialistically. It’s possible to collect Dharma—and things associated with Dharma—just as we collect rare stamps or works of art.

This is all sadly far from practicing pure view. What must be pure is the way you think. When real change comes, you have nothing to show off to your friends. The change is inside. It’s very subtle, very quiet. And it grows like a seedling coming out of the soil, at first almost invisible. That is how pure view should grow.

When you enter the Dharma, what you need to protect most is your innocence. You should come almost as a child, a seeker, as someone whose mind is open. The traditional Buddhist analogy likens the mind to a bowl. Some people have dirt in their bowls: judgment and preconceived ideas. Some complacently extrapolate their own religion. Some don’t really listen to the teachings. Their bowls are turned over. As the milk of Dharma is poured, it simply runs down the sides. Some come to the path with poison in their bowls: negative habitual tendencies and negative emotions. They have a hard edge. The way for a new student to practice in harmony with pure view is to relax the mind as much as possible, to have a mind that is gentle and receptive. Where you’ve been before, what’s happened before, and even your opinion of yourself, doesn’t really matter.

What matters is what you do today. Today you can focus on self-honesty. You can closely examine your mind, what it does, how it works. You can finally see how much of what you do results from self-absorption. How much of what you do is selfish, judgmental, and manipulative. And with your new insight, you can decide to examine yourself in the mirror very squarely. You can examine your own root poisons, and you can decide to eradicate them systematically.

The best way to do that, at first, is not to act any differently, and this is why. You may correctly realize that you are now lonely because you haven’t been kind in the past. But if you simply try to act kind all the time, you will act the way you think kindness ought to look. I have watched people try it. They learn a few things about what kindness ought to be and they conduct themselves accordingly. This hampers or prevents the necessary subtle internal change. Take a rubber band and stretch it all the way out. When you let go, it will snap back to its original shape. Now, if you yourself try to change on an external or gross level without examining the teachings and without letting your mind create a new, gentle internal habit, your mind will do the same thing as the rubber band. It has a natural shape, yes, and you can make it perform. In the past, you have made yourself jump through hoops. So you can do that, you can make your mind change. But the result will be temporary, because it’s happening in a gross and inappropriate way.

So it’s better to be gentle with yourself. Let your bowl be filled with some real milk. Absorb the teachings. Listen with a pure mind. This is like taking a rubber band and rubbing it with an oil to help it expand —perhaps only slightly. Then you rub and work it a little more, actually changing the fiber of the rubber band. Eventually, it becomes a much looser thing. Eventually, that will happen to your mind. It will become looser, more spacious. It will be more receptive to truth, a place where Dharma can live. So in the beginning, pure view for students is like an honest, gentle effort. Like an innocence. Like a relaxation.

Further along the path, pure view becomes something more meaningful, more profound. It actually arises from some of the meditational practices, specifically from what is termed “generation-stage practice.” One meditates on emptiness, which is our true primordial nature, on oneself having that nature, and then one gives rise to the particular meditational deity chosen for this practice. That is to say, one’s own self appears naturally as the meditational deity. The deity symbolizes the mind of enlightenment; meditating on oneself as the deity is actually a tool. When you engage in non-virtuous activity, you don’t have much respect for yourself, although you may cover it up with arrogance. Inside, sometimes way inside, there is a person crying because that person is not happy with non-virtuous behavior. When you do generation-stage practice, that crying is satisfied. And no matter what deity you are practicing, whatever his or her attributes, there is always the quality of kindness, and there are always the elements that produce happiness. In generation-stage practice, you begin to lose the tightness of your ordinary habitual tendencies, and you begin to develop the new habitual tendency of spontaneously abiding in pure virtuous compassion. And happiness begins.

After the generation-stage practice is completed, you pray that all sentient beings will be happy. Then you close your book and put away your mala, but your practice doesn’t really end, for you are now particularly involved with pure view. Through this practice, the mind has increasingly taken on the virtue and the attributes of the deity. Even when the practice is over, you maintain deity pride. This is not a personal pride, involving conceit or arrogance. Deity pride is different. It is confidence. Courage and a confidence that begins to change your life. If you practice the deity Chenresig, for example, deeply aware that Chenresig’s main attribute is benefiting sentient beings through compassion, you will maintain, in a solid way, an inner virtuous upright quality. You will maintain the idea that compassion is your lifeblood. That this is everything to you. You declare it. You wish it. You look for it in your mind. You try to bring it out. You do your best to live it. You create the habit of kindness.