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The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Bringing Virtue Into Life”

We can live our lives as the walking dead, and then die, unprepared, like going to a continent filled with precious jewels and coming back empty-handed. Or, we can switch on the lights, face facts and do what it takes to negotiate the shoals of samsara, as painlessly as possible.

The Buddha teaches us that we should think of our lives as like a burning room and that the smoke is beginning to choke us, fill us up. And you know, if you’re in a burning room, eventually you’re going to get burned. It’s going to consume you, right? So think of ourselves as being in a burning room, and think that there is one door. That door is wide open to you. Do you get that? It is wide open to you. That door is the door of Dharma. There is one door by which to escape and you can walk out that door. You should think of the very doorway of that door as being your own root teacher. That is the implement, the tool, that you should use to get out of that room—your teacher, your practice, Dharma.

If you were in a burning room right now, and your skin was beginning to crackle and the smoke was beginning to overcome you, how would you think about that door? With fervent regard, the way we are instructed to think about our practice. That door would look pretty much like God to you! That door would look like the best thing you ever saw! Every breath of air that came through that door would be sweeter than anything you have ever known because that door is freedom.

You should think about your practice that way, because that is the way it is. That is the way it is. In samsara here, we are locked in a burning room and there is a door. And we have the great good fortune of not only seeing that door, but having the capacity to exit through that door. Not only that, but that door has a door sill that is friendly and helpful and appropriate for the size and shape of our bodies that will help us to exit that room comfortably. And that’s how we should think about our practice. Number one, wake up. Number two, get the big picture. Number three, act as though you were a sane and reasonable person, which most of us don’t. We don’t act like sane and reasonable people.

I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know. You know that life is impermanent. You know that you have suffered, and you know that you feel unable to really face all these things because it seems so hard to simply live a virtuous life. But I can tell you that it’s like anything else that you do as a friend for yourself that’s good for you, such as changing your diet to really nutritious food. At first when you do that, you know how it is. When you’re young, you can eat anything. You have a cast iron stomach. I mean the things I ate when I was young I can’t even look at now. Now I’m 45 years old and I have to eat right. If I don’t eat right, I don’t feel good.

But do you remember what it took to change into learning how to live well in that regard? To go from eating the food that I liked to eating the food that I have learned to like was hard, and I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think I was up to it. And to go from the kind of activity that I engaged in when I was younger… Oh I could stay up all night if I wanted to, every night if I wanted to. I was blazing. I was a crazy girl. But now, if I don’t get a certain amount of sleep, the next day I’ve got bags down to my knees. You know, it’s horrible what life does to you! You look terrible and your whole face shows it. You feel awful. You feel like a dog. You feel worse than a dog.

So how did you feel when you had to change from those old habits to these new habits? At first it was painful. You didn’t want to do that. You didn’t want to change. When you learned that your body was going to fall down if you didn’t exercise, you started to exercise. At first, you hated it. You hated it. Nobody likes it when they first start to exercise. It’s painful. Your body doesn’t want to do that. But then when you finally do start to exercise, your body likes it and loves it and it feels good.

Living a virtuous life is like that. The decision to live a virtuous life is painful at first because you have to face the facts, and the facts are you’re dying. You’re dying on the hoof, right now. The second fact is that if you engage in virtuous activity you’ll be happy, and if you engage in nonvirtuous activity, you will be unhappy. That is not something we want to face. We want to do what we do, effortlessly, la la la la la, like little children. We don’t want to examine ourselves. We don’t want to look at what we do, but once we have done that,I’ve found, and many of us who are practicing for some time now have found, that we come to love our practice. We come to deepen in it and truly love it. We come to love the life of Dharma. We come to love a life that is engaged in bringing benefit and happiness to others. We come to find out at last that we never, not for a moment, liked ourselves when we were living the other way, the nonvirtuous way, the no-brainer. We never liked ourselves. There was no self-esteem happening there at all.

So then my suggestion is that we get started. Go through it. Buck up little soldier! Do what it takes to stand up tall and open your heart and get the big picture. Once you do that and you start to engage in a virtuous life, your mind will be smoother, you will be happier. You will be happier. This I promise you.

In the meantime, because our minds work the way they do and because we can’t see the direct relationship between cause and effect, we have to listen to our teachers. There is no other choice. Our teachers have crossed the ocean of suffering, just as the Buddha has done. Crossed the ocean of suffering, and returned for our sake. Our teachers, having seen the further shore and having seen the journey there and back, have come back to bring us this understanding. Live this way. Bring your life to the pinnacle of what it can be, and hold it steady and grow up, because that’s what it takes to be happy.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo. All rights reserved

 

 

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Bringing Virtue Into Life”

When you give money to the temple, do it because you need to, not because we need you to. Do it because you understand that you are the one that needs to practice the generosity. That’s your medicine.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that your root guru or your lama is the one that needs the temple. It’s completely false. It is not the lama that needs the temple. It’s the students that practice there. This is not my temple in Poolesville, Maryland. This is your temple in Poolesville, Maryland. You should take pride in its cleanliness. You should take pride in its prosperity. It should embarrass you when the bills are not paid here. It should embarrass you when things are not going well at the temple—when there is not enough participation, when we can’t find someone to cut the grass—because this is your temple. This is your house. Spiritually, you live here. This is for you. If you could just get that one small truth and take responsibility for your practice whether it’s the karma yoga of engaging in protecting your temple, propagating the teachings, making this place firm, pure and safe for others to come and practice, or whether it’s the meditational yoga of actually engaging in sit-down practice in order to benefit sentient beings, or both. Hopefully you’re doing both, because that’s what is needed.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo. All rights reserved

The following is a musical offering of the Palyul Prayer by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love series

You may ask, “Why do I have to think about suffering? Why is it that the Buddha talks about suffering and nobody else does? Why is it that today’s New Age thinkers are saying, ‘I want to be me. I want to be free,’ and the Buddha is still talking about suffering after thousands and thousands of years?” It is because the Buddha has a teaching that is very logical and very real.

If we want to exit a room, but there is a chair between us and the door, we have a number of choices. We can say that the chair is not there. We can pretend that the chair is not an obstacle to our passing through the room and that it’s not important. Or we can notice that the chair is there and get on with our journey by walking around it. That is the essence of the Buddha’s teaching. The Buddha doesn’t stop at saying, “There is suffering.” The Buddha follows that by saying, “There is a way out of suffering.” And that’s the ticket. You cannot motivate yourself to follow the path out of suffering until you generate the commitment through the realization of suffering. You can’t make yourself walk around the chair to get to the door until you face the fact that the chair is blocking your way. You have to look at the chair.

It isn’t only about walking around a chair so that you can get to the other side of the room, so that you can get out the door. There’s more to it than that. You must understand that your commitment is two-fold. In order to become the deepened practitioner that you must be, to really sink your teeth into the Buddhadharma, you must have compassion for others that is so strong and so extraordinary it will nourish you even when you are dry.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

An excerpt from the Vow of Love Series by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

In a superficial way the idea of compassion can seem very simple, and we might make the mistake of thinking that we understand it. But if we study compassion deeply, eventually we will come to understand that the ultimate view of compassion is enlightenment itself. It is the natural, primordial wisdom state itself. That’s why compassion isn’t truly known until we reach supreme enlightenment.

Compassion is the foundation of the Buddhist path. Without it, like any house that does not have a firm foundation, the house will crumble. It will not stand. One’s motivation to practice must be compassion. If your motivation is not compassion, it will be very difficult to firmly stick to the commitment to practice and meditate every day. I feel for those who say, “I’d really like to practice. I would really like to have a time in my life everyday to meditate, and yet I don’t have the discipline. I don’t have the strength. I don’t have the commitment.” If you have the right motivation, if you want to do this solely and purely from the point of view of compassion, you will find the time and you will find the commitment and you will find a way to do it. For those who have tried to meditate everyday or be consistent in their practice, if they can’t do it, my feeling is somehow the foundation of compassion isn’t strong enough.

If we could make the idea of compassion so strong that it becomes a burning fire consuming our hearts, until we are nothing but a flame. If the need to benefit others becomes so strong that it’s irresistible. If the understanding that others are suffering so unbearably in realms that we cannot even see, let alone the realms we can, that we cannot rest until we find a way to be of some lasting benefit to them. If these things can truly become part of our minds, we will find the strength to practice.

How do you find the strength to breathe? “Well,” you say, “that’s easy. Breathing is a reflex. I have to breathe. If I don’t breathe, I die.” What if you could cultivate the understanding that all sentient beings are filled with suffering that is inconceivable in its magnitude and that there are non-physical realms of existence we are not even aware of, filled with suffering? What if you could cultivate this understanding so deeply that, because of your realization, compassion and profound generosity became as much a reflex as breathing? That is possible.

“Well,” you say, “I don’t have that kind of understanding. I’m just not like that. I can’t make myself really buy into that.” Let me comfort you with this awareness. Unless you are supremely enlightened you are not born with that perfect understanding. No one is. No one is born with enough understanding of the suffering of others, and an affinity with the idea of compassion, to create that perfect discipline naturally. That understanding comes only through its cultivation, and we must cultivate that understanding consistently every day.

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love series

It’s almost impossible to attain the goal of selfless compassion, where you commit every fiber of your being to benefiting all sentient beings, seen and unseen, without a moment’s hesitation. It’s almost impossible to develop the kind of compassion where you understand that all sentient beings are revolving helplessly in such suffering that they can’t bear it, and you can’t bear to think it’s going on, without cultivating a deep understanding of suffering. You want to avoid the trap of making the very same prayers that the selfishly motivated person might do, but instead have the idea that you want to be a great Bodhisattva.

One goal will produce lasting results and the other will not. The person with the motivation of selflessness has the key. Through extraordinary, selfless compassion, that person has the strength to persevere through everything until he or she is awake. That person will persevere until he or she has completely purged from his or her mind even the smallest, gossamer thin seeds of hatred, greed and ignorance. The person whose motivation is to be the ‘good person’ will not be able to do the same for any length of time. The foundation isn’t strong enough. That person may need some kind of feedback, or warm fuzzies as reward for being good. Even tried and true Buddhists will find this impure motivation in your minds. Even our ordained Sangha will find that they, themselves, will have dry periods. You’ll go spiritually dry, bone dry, and you’ll think, “What am I doing here? I can’t go on; it’s just too hard.” Then the next day, you’ll wake up and you’ll think, “Another day…good.” You’ll have all these different feelings that are just so common. Everybody, everybody has them. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to have these feelings.

Why does it flip flop back and forth? Because you have not built the firm foundation of very pure, selfless compassion. You need to cultivate it every single moment. You need to get yourself past the point where you need warm fuzzies to keep you going. If you are only looking at the symptom of suffering and trying to manipulate your environment to turn suffering around, you will always need feedback. That feedback may or may not come. Your compassion, your love should not depend on that.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

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

No two people experience anything exactly alike, ever. It’s almost as if we see through different-colored glasses. Even the same person can experience the same event quite differently on different days. Something that bugs the potatoes out of you one day will roll right off your back the next. This is due to the ripening of your karma at the time. It ripens in slightly different ways at every moment, creating a different inner experience. A tapestry is being woven, interdependently arising. Your mind is not the same today as it was yesterday, because different karma has ripened. The threads of the tapestry are different, but your ego-clinging makes it seem the same.

Some indigenous peoples do not use the word “karma” but acknowledge that if you take something from Mother Earth, you must return something. For instance, American Indians believe that you may cut down a tree because you need the wood, provided you repay or replenish the earth. If you don’t, there is a hole that nature or Mother Earth must fill. Additionally, the imbalance you cause in the environment will be played out somehow in your life—in mind or in body, but especially in your spirit.

This idea is very similar to the concept of karma. Had we grown up with the belief that cause and effect cannot be altered, that this is a universal law that, whether we are caught or not, there will sooner or later be a payback for every situation—we would have an entirely different culture. We would not have damaged the ecological system, while disregarding the consequences. Though concern is growing, we still abuse the environment and our natural wealth. We constantly make deals promoting personal gain. This is not wrong unless we take from others with no regard for their welfare. But we applaud business deals that benefit us and hurt others. Getting ahead is the American way. “That’s politics,” or “That’s business,” we say. We have learned to condone selfishness, totally disregarding its impact on our minds.

As we “learn” that for some things there is no payback, a poison gradually infiltrates our mindstreams. Many powerful people profess traditional religious beliefs yet complacently engage in graft, bribery, obstruction of justice, embezzlement, and lying. Believe me, if the first people to cut down a rain forest (or to bring a species close to extinction) had been struck by lightning, there would be no ecological problem today. If the earth had opened up and swallowed the owners and operators, there would be no problem with strip mining. But the payback is often slow in coming. We remain unskilled in connecting causes with their inexorable effects.

Suppose you go to a party at someone’s house and see some perfume samples. You think: “They have lots of these, so I’ll just take one. It’s no big deal. Surely if I asked, they would give it to me.” Later you go to a grocery store and think: “Gee, I’d really like one of those cookies. Just one, because if I buy the whole pack, I might get fat.” Then you notice a pack that is broken open. “Well,” you think, “it’s already open, so I’ll just slip one little cookie out. The store can’t sell them now, anyway. They have a budget to cover that.” Even if no one misses the perfume or the cookie, you have changed in your mindstream. The change is subtle. But you have changed. And if you continue to act that way, your mind will become hard. It must—because something inside of you knows what is right and what is wrong. Something inside you is very moral. There is a sensitivity to things balancing out. It may not be the part that you can listen to, but karma, the potential for karma, the reality of karma, the interaction of karma—exists in the mindstream of every sentient being.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Bringing Virtue into Life”

A lot of people play the power game of trying to gain power and domination over other people simply because they feel if they can control others it will make them happy. They will be powerful. They will be shielded from hurt because they are dominant. Others are weaker than them and they don’t care whether they hurt the people under them or not. They do whatever they want to do in order to make themselves happy. That’s what people do. What they don’t realize is that in every conceivable sense they are making themselves more and more unhappy. That kind of power over others will never produce happiness. In some future time that very person who is such a power monger will be the most powerless of sentient beings. Think about the helpless little creatures that are kept in cages in pet shops to be sold to who knows. Think about the helpless little creatures that are kept in laboratories to be tested on for who knows what purpose. That kind of helplessness. So we are talking about curable suffering and unhappiness and we bring it on ourselves through cause and effect relationships. This is one of the teachings that the Buddha has given us that is very, very logical, and we can see small examples of it within our lives. If we engage in non-virtuous behavior, it will produce unhappiness.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo. All rights reserved

 

 

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

As you generate yourself as a Buddha or Bodhisattva, reciting mantras and devotional prayers, your mind arises as a pure form. This is different from the ordinary mind that struggles to wake up each morning, dragging along its ego-clinging baggage or karma and looking for happiness in futile ways. This pure form is an expression of pure cognition, free of conceptualization and limitation. It is pure awareness, a state of pure luminosity. The deity we generate is an expression of that pure state. All phenomena are understood to be the deity’s body, voice, and activity. Thus, phenomena cease being something we grasp.

Generation-stage and completion-stage practice disassemble the entire time-and-space grid, disassemble the moment itself. You dissolve into emptiness and purify all things into their natural state. Thus, the mind relaxes from the tension that is gathered around “I,” and it becomes possible to reconstruct the moment naturally through the creation of the mandala and through allowing the mind to arise as the deity. This great skill is accomplished when the entire process becomes effortless.

“How,” you may ask, “can it be effortless? The mandala, the whole process, seems very complicated.” Actually, it is less complicated than what you are currently perceiving. You have a mandala going right now. Look around you. You sit on a world that sits in a galaxy that sits in a universe, and it is all lit up. How do you ever manage to conceive it? And on top of that, you pay your electric bill, call people on the phone, feed your pets and yourself. You enter a metal thing that flies through the air from one place to another. It is an extremely complicated mandala. In addition, you are constantly moving through a chain of lives in six major realms in a completely un-predictable pattern.

The generation of the deity is far easier. It is natural and spontaneous because it is not built on the assumption of ego. It is not constructed of tension because the deity is understood to be real but insubstantial. It is understood to be that which does not need to be constantly maintained. The tension of survival associated with desire and egocentricity is not there. With the continuation of this practice and the skill developed through good concentration and an effortless effort, all perception is purified. The five senses are not given their lead. They are not permitted to feed back information that satisfies the need of self to be self. They are purified by the mind naturally arising as the deity. The karma of endless cycles of birth and death is purified at last.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a public talk given by His Holiness Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok:

The Buddha taught that true happiness and peace can never be found through material gain, and the only way that one can truly be satisfied is to realize this point. Therefore it is very important for all of you to consider decreasing your attachment to the objects of this world, to all apparent phenomena, and to understand that more important than spending most of one’s time pursuing the material world and thinking that happiness can be found in this way, we should try to practice pure Dharma. Not only that. To be too attached to friends, family members, even our children and our spouses, those whom we cherish, thinking that it is only through our relationships with them that we can have happiness, is only going to bring us more suffering. This is also a source of suffering, since we will be distracted having to figure out how we can bring food to the table and get clothing for our offspring and all of the other necessities that one has to completely fill one’s mind with. The details of survival for family and friends will completely distract one from the benefits of purely practicing Dharma.

Regarding the wish for fame and glory: Those who don’t have it suffer because they don’t. Those who are poor and those who have no position at all are always having some expectation that somehow and in some way they may be able to rise above this circumstance and achieve a position of fame and glory. Those who are already in positions of fame, glory and leadership are always suffering from the fear that they are going to lose their positions. So in both cases the suffering is more or less equal. On this point I would like to say that probably here in this place there are those who are very, very poor and there are those who are very, very wealthy and in high positions, and there is quite a big space between them. I was thinking that those who are in the high positions are probably suffering even more than those who are poor. The reason for that is because those who are poor—except for the fact that they are always having some kind of an expectation that someday they may become wealthy or in a better position—probably have enough to survive, are getting along sort of all right. And the mental suffering that they endure is not too extreme, except for that expectation or wish. But those who are in high positions are probably suffering much more because they are always fearful that they are going to lose their positions, that they will fall down to a lower place. So their minds are filled with doubt and paranoia and anxiety. In this way they suffer more than the poor people.

The nature of suffering is twofold: Suffering is caused by delusion and by karmic propensities. When we speak of delusion, it refers to three root conflicting emotions: desire-attachment, anger or aggression, and delusion itself, stupidity. Let’s look at desire-attachment first. Now this conflicting emotion fixates itself upon objects, objective appearances, such as material things, fame, status or other human beings or individuals. Wherever it fixates, then if one allows oneself to become controlled by that emotion, then the only result will be unceasing suffering or discontent.

Anger or aggression is a conflicting emotion which causes one to feel that one actually wishes that others will suffer. That which brings up this conflicting emotion of aggression is due to the desire-attachment that we have for ourself and those that we are already attached to because if anyone else tries to harm them, then those other people who are trying to harm our loved ones or friends are termed enemies, and we feel aggression towards them and wish that harm would come to them. As soon as we enter into this type of emotional battle, the only result is unceasing suffering.

That which is termed delusion or stupidity is the inability to understand or recognize what should be accepted, what should be rejected, what should be accomplished and what should be abandoned. Inner divisions of delusion include misunderstanding and incorrect understanding. The first of these inner divisions of delusion, misunderstanding, could also be interpreted as misunderstanding, or misusing, the ultimate purpose of this life. The way that that would qualify is that one would have to be born as a human being anywhere in this world who never really understands the difference between that which is wholesome and that which is unwholesome, never having any real kind of ability to discern what should be accepted in order to produce true, positive results and what should be rejected—basically just spending one’s life aimlessly living like a cow or a horse which can graze and eat grass and just kind of survive. The difference between a cow or a horse and a person who is just kind of aimlessly surviving is maybe the person is able to put on clothes and other kinds of comfort. But really the point that is being made is that this person who misunderstands the purpose of life is wasting his or her opportunity because they dwell in this state of delusion, the delusion of misunderstanding what should be done with life.