Tibetan Buddhist Altar » ignorance

End Desire

Jetsunma — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:30:15 +0000

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

Where does desire come from? It comes from the belief that self-nature is real. According to the Buddha, if you believe that you are a self, if you believe in self-nature as being real, as being truly existent, then there has to be desire, because in order to be a self or to have a self, you have to define a self. That’s how it is. If you believe in the nature of self, you have to have an underlying belief that self ends here and other begins there. You have to have some conceptualization in your mind about what the self is, because the idea of self cannot exist without some definition. Conceptual proliferation develops, and with that, desire.

Desires are not always fulfilled. There is always the contest between self and other, and from those contests the three root poisons of hatred, greed and ignorance occur. It is the presence of hatred, greed and ignorance in the mind that causes phenomena to appear as they do. If there were no hatred, greed and ignorance in the mind, there would be no cause for suffering and therefore we would not see the phenomena of war, hunger, old age, sickness and death in the world. There would be no cause. This is the understanding and commitment that you should think about and work with in your mind.

While Samsara Burns

Jetsunma — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 02:20:34 +0000

The following is from a series of tweets by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

Some of them are prideful, full of themselves in a way that precludes actual opening. Like cigar smoke in a furnished room makes a man.

Some are like Nero, madly playing in the bubble of delusion while samsara burns. Burns.

Some are ignorance. Like eyes watching a world of smoke and mirrors, totally orchestrated by madness.

Some are mechanical, reactive, tight. With a prototype protective covering, no one will notice they are not quite human.

For some it means nothing. Awake, asleep – shallow and deep. Up and high or on the fly – maybe you can’t help it. Or maybe I can’t.

Some go evil. Manipulation is evil. Like raising my kids. No one can discipline unless they have birthed and loved, wanted the best for them, I believe. And stick with that.

And the killers? Just keep them from harming more. I don’t care if they watch cable , swim, and have massage all day.

I wish we could all sit down and pray,

make offerings in some peaceful way,

for our selfishness we could offer light

no reason to fight.

Listen, we can do this,

we can blow right through this,

if we never take our minds off what’s right- Ja!

I could go on all night! Hallelujah and Amen!

Confronting Ignorance

Jetsunma — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:55:32 +0000

From a series of tweets by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

Hello Twitterverse. I’m back, sadly unable to do much retreat, had a double root canal with a major abscess. Hurt bad, as did treatment. And I have two more, maybe three. Two more abscessed teeth. I hate pain pills with a purple passion but I had to get hammered with them. Now still sore, but only mind blowingly so when I hit it while talking. Nice. So I’ll type.

Problem is I let it go for way too long. Not good. If I could cut out the last three-ish years of my life I would. I couldn’t accomplish anything and it just wasn’t worth the pain to keep going. I so wish I could cut out the abscess in my emotions like we can with teeth.

Right now I see, for one thing, that our Mother planet is in deep trouble. Very few bother to learn what the issues are. And don’t care. It breaks my heart to see it. I search for caring people and can’t find them, even in my Sangha. Why do people find ignorance so appealing? Does it make you blond? (Woo-hoo) will we be moving to another planet? I hadn’t heard. Do we think angels will fix it? More likely than us, I guess.

You see, a culture of commerce needs you to be stupid so you will believe them. They depend on your self-absorption. And you kindly oblige. Nuclear Japan will not stop. You didn’t see Osama bin Laden got deep sixed. Did you see it? Did you hear? And tell me, how can big gigantic “Buddhists” go out to eat and “nosh” with starvation in their own communities? How have we become so selfish? Our rescues have little funding and no one will raise money for them. Our Stupas so precious to us all? Yeah, so we can’t manage to pay off the land they are on. I feel mangled. Did I do any good? Will any benefit last?

The crap we chase after is embarrassing. Chin tuck anyone? Could’ve fed a lot of hungry with that. I’m not a judge or jury. I’m just sad and so disappointed. I really tried. And we just don’t care. I am so sorry for us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we just don’t care. I love this planet. And her people. But for the life of me I do not understand. Why do the rich do nothing? Why are the ignorant so willing to be that way? Why do we play “bliss ninny” thinking mellow is sweet like jello? And there is always room for that crap. Sweet and fake!

Will we save this planet? Naw. Will we go out for lunch, brunch, and dinner? Sure, why not, right? We are entitled to enjoy, right? Bullshit! At least “Micky D” is cheap. Leave some change for the homeless, will ya? Enjoy your dinner…

Pick Your Poison

Jetsunma — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:30:26 +0000

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo on October 18, 1995

We have made many offerings to the Guru. Mostly what we have offered the Guru are five cups: five cups of poison. We have offered the Guru hatred, because there in the presence of the primordial nature, there in the presence of the display of the Bodhicitta, there in that non-dual pristine purity, we have shamelessly hated, abused, and neglected. We have committed horrible sins against others who are innocent – against motherly sentient beings — not only in this lifetime, but previously as well. And we have done this bold-faced in the presence of that which is so holy as to be indescribable.

We have offered the cup of greed and grasping. Every single day in the presence of our own mind, the face of the Guru, in the great silent sound of primordial emptiness, there in the great quiet light of the display of luminosity, right there in the place of Bodhicitta, from our mouth, we have offered the cup of greed instead of the speech of comfort. This is what we have offered to the Guru. This is the offering that we have made. Without shame we grasp. We are filled with greed. We do nothing but think about me, me, me, and “What I can have?” and “What I can do?” and “How great I am!” and “Don’t you want to give me some more approval?” “Don’t you want to give me some more?” This is what we do in the face of the Guru.

And then the third cup that we offer to the face of the Guru is our ignorance. Not only do we begin with ignorance – which is forgivable, in the sense that we are born; we wake up; at five or six years old we come to consciousness. Later on, we figure out that we’re as dumb as posts. We just don’t know. We are ignorant. We don’t have the teaching yet. But now we have come to the point where we have received the teaching. We have received enough of the teaching where you could say that while we still abide in samsara, we are moving away from ignorance. We are bringing down, or quelling, the poison of ignorance. Yet, in the face of the Guru, in the face of the primordial empty nature that is our nature, in the face of the very display of Bodhicitta, we have willfully remained ignorant. Willfully. We have not accomplished our practice. We have turned away from our practice. We have not tried very hard. We have not listened to the teachings. We have not taken the advice of our Gurus. We continue to listen to the teaching as though it was water rolling off of our back

Imagine that you had one chance to listen to Guru Rinpoche and that was the only contact with Dharma that you were ever going to have in your whole life, and Guru Rinpoche offered to give you the keys to liberation, everything that you need. What would that listening look like? Hopefully, if you are not dumber than a post, you would listen to the Guru as though it were your very breath. You would listen with your whole heart and every word would be like food, like nectar to you. You would take every bit of it home and work with it all the time. If that were the only opportunity you would ever receive and you were receiving these teachings from Guru Rinpoche, maybe you might think like that.

But in the face of our root Guru that’s not what we do. We report dutifully for class and we hear the teachings. I used to walk around and ask students, “What was the teaching about that I taught the other night?” But I stopped that because that used to break my heart, when there was no answer.

We are faulted in the way that we make offerings. We cling to our ignorance. We have heard the method, we have heard the teachings, and yet we do not practice accordingly, to the best of our abilities. And so, we have offered the cup of ignorance to our Guru. And that has been the best that we could do.

The next cup that we have offered to the Guru is jealousy. Bold faced, in the face of our very nature, in the very display of Bodhicitta we have looked at the accomplishments of others, and we have said, I can do that. We have competed and we have been jealous. We have looked to other’s belongings and we have said, “I wish I had that instead of you.” We try to make ourselves feel better, to practice self-aggrandizement, by lifting ourselves up and putting others down. These things we have done in the very face of the Guru who is indistinguishable from us and from our nature, and indistinguishable from the nature of all beings. There is only nature. It is not divided into pigeon holes. Its not like an ice-cube tray where its all divided into sections. So when we look into the face of any other sentient being, any motherly sentient being, and perform our usual ritual of jealousy and competitiveness, then this is the game that we are actually playing with the root Guru. We have, therefore in truth, been jealous and competitive toward the root Guru, because there is no distinction. And if we think that it’s okay to be that way in front of other sentient beings but not okay to be that way in front of the Guru, then we are holding up the cup of ignorance as well. By now we should know better than that. We have been taught more than that. By now we know that all sentient beings have within them the Buddha nature, the Buddha seed, and that is inseparable from the Guru’s nature. So, if we harm, or ignore, or treat badly or abuse others, this is what we have done to the Guru. We have held up the cup of jealousy.

And the last wonderful offering that we have made to the Guru is the cup of pride. In front of the Guru, that nature which is all-pervasive, fundamentally undifferentiated, free of any kind of conjecture, or contrivance, or distinction; in front of that pure display, we have held ourselves up as great, special and superior. We have held ourselves up as that which requires special attention. We have held ourselves up as that which requires approval because we are so wonderful. And we have not been ashamed, in front of the face of the Guru, to indicate that we are superior to others. We have not been ashamed to do that. Strangely, we feel shame and embarrassment at the idea of surrender in devotion, but we have no shame about showing our stinking nasty pride in front of the face of the Guru. That doesn’t bother us at all. Our thinking is completely backwards.

Now, this is not good news. We like hear good inspiring things. We like to be entertained. This is not the kind of thing that we like to hear. But you know, if you really are honest with yourself, if you really examine yourself, you know that what I am saying is true.