Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Precious Nectar of Enlightenment

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

When we meditate on Buddhahood or contemplate on what it would be like to achieve realization, what do we think we are after?  What do we think the result will be?  Eventually, through the force of our practice, we are hoping, (and if we practice well, this will surely be the result), that someday we will awaken as the Buddha has awakened.  So we are actually looking to give rise to the very same thing that we are looking at when we see the Guru. We are looking to give rise to the primordial empty nature. We are looking to give rise to this nature which is free of contrivance, free of distinction; this primordial empty nature that is the innate nature, the Buddha nature.  We are trying to give rise to that in such a way that it appears, even within samsara.  We wish to attain realization now.  So it is that very union of emptiness and display, of emptiness and luminosity, of wisdom and method that we wish to give rise to in our practice.  This is the very ultimate object of refuge.

From the Vajrayana point of view we are told that realization will never happen without the necessary ripening that is provided by the root Guru.  We are told that in our practice we are dependent upon the root Guru to transmit this blessing and to lead us through the door of liberation.  But we must understand that it is more than that.  Practicing devotion in the way that we do opens the door, creates the connection, creates the habit, creates the karma, creates the cause by which we will awaken to our own primordial wisdom nature in the future.  And that nature will appear in samsara as the enlightened appearance.  This is the goal.  This is the very wish.  Understood in that way, the Lama then becomes even more the center of our mandala – the mandala of our practice, of our hope, of our prayers, of our devotion, of our lives.  The Lama, then, becomes the very core of our lives.

You must understand that there is never a time that you are not in the presence of the Lama. Not for a moment is there a time that you are not in the presence of the Lama.  If you refuse, if through ignorance you doubt, if through habit you ignore, if through slothfulness you simply put no effort into accomplishing that view, then you are not actually turning away from the Guru “out there.”  This is not an act that is happening between you and somebody else.  You are not slighting the person that is sitting on the throne.  That is not what is happening.  What is happening is that you are turning your own mind away from the very face of your Enlightenment, away from your nature. You are splitting yourself away from salvation. You are wrenching yourself away from the very hope that will bring future happiness and realization.  You are cutting yourself away from the root of your accomplishment.

Now that I have told you this, you cannot in good faith and good conscience remain superficial in your practice any longer.  You must understand that every moment that you say, “Oh, well, I can do this,” or every time you push away the Lama in order to live in your ordinary samsaric mental posture; every time you do that, you are spitting in the face of your own Buddha seed.  You are turning yourself away from primordial emptiness, from the Buddha nature, from the pure luminosity that is the very display of that nature, that luminosity that we also know as the Bodhicitta.  So then you have abandoned the root of your accomplishment.  You have abandoned the very milk of your nature, and you have shut the door to the great Bodhicitta. That is what we do when we forget and deny that we are always sitting at the feet of the Guru.  We are always looking into the eyes of the Guru. And so, we have to train ourselves to keep the Guru above the crown of the head, on the throne within our hearts, in our eyes, in our ears, in our hands.  We have to train ourselves as though we were some kind of precious vessel that was carrying around this most precious nectar of Enlightenment.  We can’t spill a drop; neither can we turn away from it.  And we’ve spilled so many drops already.

But now we know what we have in our hands, and like practitioners that have perhaps moved from childhood to adulthood, we can now expect ourselves not to drop the ball, not to drop our practice, whereas before, we were like children.  You know, when you teach children to prostrate, you do not worry whether their form is perfect.  When you teach them to say mantra, you know they are going to make mistakes.  But now we’re moving past that regarding our devotional yoga.  We can no longer allow ourselves to be the children that we once were.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Rest in Wakefulness

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

What is it that we actually see when we see the Guru?  First of all, the Guru is perfection.  The Guru is perfect. The Guru arises very naturally, is spontaneously liberated; there is nothing about this appearance that has become tainted or impure.  There is no conceptualization.  There is no contrivance at all.  We are seeing a natural display of the Primordial Wisdom State.  We are literally seeing, in a non-dual way, the union of emptiness and luminosity. Now, of course, because of the way our samsaric minds work, we are not able to understand the non-duality of emptiness and luminosity.  We are simply not able to understand that.  To us they appear as two nouns.  Emptiness is emptiness.  We can describe that.  Luminosity is luminosity.  We can maybe describe that, and so: emptiness-and-luminosity-are-non-dual.  The best way to come to that is maybe to say it real quick! That’s about as well as we can do!

What is this non-dual display, this non-duality called emptiness and luminosity?  Well, first of all, we must understand that the Lama represents the primordial empty nature, that nature which is completely free of any kind of distinction or contrivance, any kind of ideation, any color, any form, anything that becomes something.  The Lama is the display of that which is without beginning and without end, of that which is primordially pure with no change, no movement, no contrivance or distinguishing factors whatsoever.  The Lama represents that pure emptiness.  When we talk about emptiness in that way, Americans have a difficult time with that; that’s why I’m trying to explain it in common ways, rather than using the traditional buzzwords.

When we think of emptiness, we think of a minus in a sense; like, an empty room is a room without things in it.  We think of an empty glass as a glass without liquid in it.  That’s the way that we understand emptiness, but in this case, you should understand that emptiness doesn’t mean an “absence of.” Emptiness, in this case, is more like freedom, more like liberation: liberation from conceptualization, liberation from contrivance.  The mind does not catch on, the mind does not hook, the mind does not hold in a package – anything.  You see?  Here, emptiness is liberation. Suppose you were capable at this moment of losing all the fetters, allowing the mind to abide spontaneously, allowing the mind to simply rest in wakefulness.  Rest in wakefulness.  That is perhaps the closest to how we might understand emptiness.

Luminosity is something we think about as a plus, like a light being on.  A light is on or it’s off.  Luminosity, we think of as something luminous, so it must be glowing. Of course, that’s not what we’re talking about here either.  Let’s say you could attain in your practice that true understanding of emptiness: if one could rest in innate wakefulness, free of contrivance, without any kind of distinction or super-structuring or building or grasping or clinging. Try to imagine a mind such as that.  Try to imagine a posture such as that, in a sense, even free of the condition of mind.  Try to imagine a posture such as that: innate wakefulness.  Then suppose that nature, free of contrivance, were to show itself:  gossamer, free, buoyant.  There are no words in English to describe it.

 

From the profound, innate wakefulness that is empty of contrivance, should a display show itself that was like that nature, inseparable from that nature in every single sense;  that display was not leaving the state of emptiness in order to show itself; completely indistinguishable from emptiness in the same way that the sun’s rays are completely indistinguishable from the sun itself; that there is no way to tell what is actually the tight hard ball of the sun, and what is the light and heat that comes out of it; that there is no way to tell the difference really: if we could imagine such display, we might call that luminosity.  We might say that this profound view of emptiness, this spontaneous, innate wakefulness that is complete and yet unbegun, could somehow show its face in a gossamer, uncontrived inseparable display that you can’t call light, you can’t call movement, you can’t call anything because it has not moved out of that nature. Because we need to use a word we say luminosity, but you must understand that this emptiness and luminosity are indistinguishable from one another.  We must also understand that this is what the Lama actually represents.

The Lama represents, therefore, the Primordial Wisdom State: that which is the wakefulness of Buddhahood in dance, in display, in radiance; not separate from the innate nature, yet arising in a completely pure display that is the primordial nature.  You have to say “indistinguishable from.”  That is what the Lama actually is. You could say that the Lama represents the union of emptiness and movement, or display.  You could say that the Lama represents the union of wisdom and method.  Guru Rinpoche appears to us always with the dakini.  He is always in union with the dakini.  Even when we see him in the pictures that we have of him or statues that we have of him, we may see him seeming alone; still, he has in the cleft of his left arm the symbol of the dakini.  So in his nature he is never without the dakini.  That is a teaching, a very profound teaching for us, as to how to understand the Lama.  The Lama, then, is understood as the appearance of the primordial nature, and the display of that nature appearing in our world, in our eyes, in our samsaric existence.  The Lama, then, represents the union of emptiness and luminosity.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

In Your Hands

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An Excerpt from a teaching called Our Motivation Is For Those Who Have Hopes of Us by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

When you practice you should think of all the uncountable beings who through ages and ages of wandering and endless revolution in cyclic existence you have had some either meaningful or meaningless contact with.  I can tell you for certain — absolute certain — that there will come a day when you will see them again.  And due to the purity of your intention and due to the strength of your practice, you will hold them in your hands.  And it’s only your compassion and your love that will be of benefit to them.  You will be able to bring them to the end of their suffering.  You have to remember that — and practice accordingly.

You have to remember that now you don’t have the power to look into the eyes of even your own children, your most beloved ones — your lovers, your husbands, your wives — you don’t have the power to look into their eyes and say, “I will always take care of you.  I will follow you. I will make sure that you’re all right.”  You can’t promise even your babies that you will feed them always.  You can’t make them that promise because they will die, and you don’t have — if you don’t have the practice — the power to see that they are happy in the next life.  There’s only one way you can keep that promise.  And that is through the sincerity and purity of your intention and through your practice.  But you can do that.  Due to Guru Rinpoche’s blessing, these things you can do now.

You can make prayers that in a future life you’ll be able to take those you now love so dearly in your hands and hold them until they achieve realization, that they will find the Dharma and be sure-footed on the path.  And the potency of that prayer will make a difference.  During the course of your life you should practice, knowing for certain that you are responsible for them, knowing for certain that you will hold them in your hands.  Knowing for certain that that’s the only way that love of any kind can be meaningful.

So you should come to the Dharma with the heart of a child, hoping that in the future you will be able to free from suffering those with whom you’ve come into contact.  The lamas teach us that the ones we love will someday be in our hands.  Now is the time to practice so that we don’t let them down.  Do not abandon them.  Do not forget them.  Hold them as carefully as you hold your own breath, and with more concern.  Because if you practice now, you will see them again.  Remember they are the ones who have hopes of you.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

For Those Who Have Hopes of Us

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An Excerpt from a teaching called Our Motivation Is For Those Who Have Hopes of Us by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

One of my teachers told me that he feels he has spent his whole life throwing seed out and that very little of it has landed on soil.  Most of it has landed on rocks and hard places.  That this teacher, who is so precious to me, could feel like this breaks my heart.  But it’s our fault, because we forget.  If our motivation to practice is not compassion — is anything other than realizing again and again and again, to the point where we cannot bear it, the suffering of beings — it is useless.

Every morning we should wake up knowing that others around the world are waking up hungry.  We can go down to breakfast; they can’t.  Every morning we should wake up knowing that we can practice Dharma this day.  We can do something about our condition.  We have a potency to our lives.  Others just continue — unconsciously, mindlessly, having no idea about cause and effect relationships.  Others continue with unbelievable suffering.

I remember feeling tremendous sadness watching the bullocks in India pulling huge carts from early in the morning till late at night and being whipped the whole time.  It isn’t only human suffering — it’s the suffering of all sentient beings that we should be touched by because they are all essentially the same.  They all have the Buddha nature; they have that seed.  And these are the ones that have hopes of us, because if we can think of them, there is a connection.  They have no method.  They have no practice.  They have nothing other than whatever pure intention we can muster up.  And so we can’t waste a moment.  We can’t waste even a second.  These are the ones that we are responsible for.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The Seed of the Buddha Nature Within

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A Teaching by Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

When one begins to understand some of the ideas that are presented in Dharma, one realizes that the goal that we are engaged in “moving toward,” if you’ll forgive that bad choice of words, is actually Buddha Nature itself. We tend to consider that the path is like a thing that goes from here to there, like a movement toward, and it’s very hard not to conceptualize it in that way. But, in fact, when one practices Dharma, the ability to practice Dharma is actually based on the understanding of the innate Nature. If we did not have within us right now the seed of Enlightenment, if we did not have within us the potential to actualize ourselves as the Buddha, there would be no point of practice. The very basis for practice is that understanding. This is what the Buddha himself taught – that all sentient beings have within them the seed of Buddha Nature, and that Nature is their true Nature, in fact. However, they have not awakened to that Nature and so, in order awaken to that Nature, one engages in the path. The path should not be considered a ‘thing,’ a straight line that connects from here to there. The path should be understood as a method that one uses in order to awaken to that Nature which is already our Nature; which is complete, unchanging, and will never get any bigger or any smaller. One should understand that Dharma is actually an activity that is meant to awaken that potential. But the ultimate goal that one wishes for when one engages in Dharma, is, of course, Enlightenment itself. Now, what is Enlightenment? One understands that Enlightenment is actually the awakening to the Primordial Wisdom Nature, the awakening to the Buddha nature.

The Buddha never said that he was different from anyone else. He said simply, “I am awake.” He is indicating that he has awakened to the fullness of his own Nature and is able to abide spontaneously in that awakened state without any interruption or impediment. So, from that perspective, the basis of practice, the basis of the path itself is exactly the same as the goal. They are indistinguishable from one another. The path that one uses in order to achieve the goal is also indistinguishable from the basis, which is the Buddha Nature, and is also indistinguishable from the goal, which is the Buddha Nature. So, these three things, the basis, the method and the goal are indistinguishable from one another.

For us, however, it does not appear to be so, simply because of the way our minds work, involved in discursive thought as they are. We distinguish between what is potential and movement. We distinguish between movement and the goal. But in truth, you cannot distinguish between these three. If the basis for practice is the same as the goal, then anything in which you engage in order to achieve that awakening to your own Nature, must also be indistinguishable from your own Nature. The path, then, or the method, is not separate from the Buddha Nature.

Now, where we run into trouble is when we make our Dharma practice an outward movement that goes somewhere. When we do our practice, we project that there is going to be a certain result. That very subtle concept prevents the practice from doing all that it can do to remove obstacles from our own perception, because we cling to the idea of here-ness and there-ness, of such-ness and thus-ness, and in doing so, we cling to the idea of self. It’s very hard to understand that subtle difference, but that subtle difference is very important. If we did not view our Dharma practice as a subject, object, thing or as a linear movement in some way, we would more easily understand that the goal is the un-moveable, unchangeable, fully complete and spontaneously realized Nature itself, which is already present. The potential for the realization of that Nature would be much stronger in our practice, in terms of taking responsibility for our situation and utilizing our practice to its fullest capacity.

In order for us to consider our Dharma practice, or even the ability to listen to teachings, as a movement that ‘goes somewhere’ we have to be considering it in a very superficial way. But if the practice is understood as a natural and spontaneous manifestation, arising from the Buddha Nature that is our Nature, then the practice becomes less materialistic and more meaningful in a very profound way. In the same way, if we are in an ordinary environment and an ordinary teacher comes before us, we don’t respond as we would if the Buddha himself, with all the signs and marks, were sitting in front of us. If the Buddha appeared, we would respond with, “Whoa! Whoa! This is important! Something is happening here. The Buddha is here!” In truth, we should respond that same way to our own simple practice because that practice is indistinguishable from the Buddha Nature itself. The Buddha is here. But you see, the impact is different. Why the impact is different is because of the way that we consider and understand what we’re doing.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Seeing The Guru’s Face in All Things

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

We have to find a way to live in a constant state of recognition.  The greatest power that any of us can have is that practice of recognition.  To give rise to the bodhicitta in our ordinary lives, to give rise to an awakening state in our ordinary lives, to give rise to compassion, which is the very display of the Buddha’s miraculous intention in our lives, this is the way that we change our lives meaningfully.  It won’t change our lives permanently because even our lives aren’t permanent.  But this the way we deeply and meaningfully change our lives, through applying the antidote.

Running around like a chicken without a head trying to make everything work makes you a chicken without a head.  It does not make you successful.  It will not help.  I don’t know how better to put this to you, but consciousness creates form. There is no getting around that. There is no other way.  It is through the mindfulness of our practice, it is through spiritual discrimination that we can make an actual change in the flavor, the condition and the results of our lives, and that’s really the only way.  Anything else that we do is like putting a bandaid on an ulcer.  It’s just festering underneath there, and pretty soon it’s just going to open under the bandaid.  Do you see what I’m saying?  The disease is still there, and I’m using a disgusting analogy because it should be disgusting.

But when you practice the antidote, you’re talking about healing something from the inside out, from the root cause, which is your mindstream, your consciousness.  It’s so real, and we’ve never had the opportunity to see how real it is: how this spiritual mindfulness, this lifting up of what is sacred, this practicing of bodhicitta in every aspect of our lives, this looking for the Guru’s face in all things — we have not had the opportunity to see what a tremendous life changer this is, what a tremendous empowerment, what a tremendous power to live it gives us.  And so we’re asleep, sleeping peacefully, thinking all we have to do is do the things, the busywork, that keeps us afloat, and we don’t know why life happens to us the way that it does.

Your life is not happening to you.  You are caught in a feedback loop, if you will.  Let me use some electronics: caught in a feedback loop, a bubble, a reflection.  You look outward, and you see your own mind moving back and forth.  That’s kind of a feedback loop, a constant, circular kind of motion, and the qualities of your mind display themselves in the world, and they have the same taste as the quality of your mindstream.  The external conditions that you have and the quality of your mindstream:  same taste.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Baby Steps to Recognition

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Sometimes when we begin to make offerings of what we experience to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, we may think it’s not a good idea to offer something that’s not ours, but that’s only because we’re materialists and have this idea of ownership.  We really don’t understand how things are.  We’re kind of sick and deluded with this idea of the self being the center of all experience.  So that being the case, when we offer a tree or a field of flowers that isn’t ours or even offer an experience that you have with someone else that’s wonderful and pleasurable to you or to see a friend of yours that has not one, not two, but three cars — for you to offer any of those things to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas in your mind, is that illegal because you don’t own them?  Of course not.  The idea isn’t about ownership.  It isn’t about defining that, yet again.  It’s about allowing these five senses to participate in Recognition in some way, even if it’s only in a small way.  To offer anything that one sees, any image that is formulated in the eyes, any sound – the sound of the beloved’s voice, maybe your beloved friend, your beloved spouse or child – the sound of that voice that is so comforting and so wonderful to us, that very sound can be offered when it meets your ears.  Rather than owning it and saying this is about me and my children or me and my spouse or me and my stuff, instead make that kind of ongoing process of offering.

In a very real sense, you’re not so much offering the object as you are offering your response to the object.  You’re allowing your senses, your thoughts, and your sensibilities to work in a different way than they have worked before, so then you can feel free.  You can offer someone else’s money.  You can do anything you want to in that way as long as you are truly sincere and it’s done in a profound way.  Remember, we’re keeping in mind the faults of cyclic existence, and practicing that kind of renunciation because we have seen the faults of cyclic existence.

Perhaps you meet somebody really rich, and you may notice, because of the contemplations you’ve been doing on the faults of cyclic existence, that those people are so connected to their money that there is some real clinging going on there. Maybe you notice that that person is all about their money and maybe, because you’ve practiced Recognition, you can see that this is a non-virtue.  You can see that this is not making that person happy, that literally the money has no power to make that person happy.  So knowing that, in your practice you can visualize that money and offer it to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas.  What good does that do?  Does the money disappear out of the banks?  No.  Perhaps there is some small blessing.  Perhaps more importantly, you, by making such an offering and by thinking that way, can begin to differentiate, to distinguish between clinging and some form of Recognition that there is something more precious than our egos. Maybe it’s a baby step, but many of those baby steps make for big movements.

Cultivate the habit of constantly offering everything that you see, all pleasure, and even hardship.  When we come into a place in our life where it’s very uncomfortable, where there’s some hardship and we survive and perhaps overcome that hardship, that very event can also be offered.  That event can be considered practice, a manifestation of an opportunity to have made offerings, to have been more mindful, and to have been in a better state of Recognition.  Then, that very difficulty that you just survived becomes a form of practice.  It becomes sacred.

For Westerners, our biggest problem is that lack of a deeper understanding of how to practice.  We still think that you go to church on Sunday, and so you practice on Sunday.  You do your religious thing on Sunday and maybe on the other holidays.  We still have that division in our mind.  We are deeply materialistic people, and that is the worst, most horrible delusion that we’re stuck in: that inability to recognize any distinction because of our material outlook.  Practicing in the way I’ve described gives us the opportunity to develop constant mindfulness, purification of the mind, and constantly creating new habitual tendencies.  It’s perfect for Westerners to practice in this way in addition to their sit-down practice because we have such limited time to sit down.  In addition, in this culture we’re taught that when you’re sitting down, you’re being lazy, and our whole commitment, therefore, is to be busy all the time.  So one way to begin to counteract that is to practice in this way of constantly making offerings.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The Point of Practice

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Training the mind is a very personal, very intimate, and very private thing because there is nobody that can train our minds better than we can.  No one can know the ins and outs of how we think better than we can, and so that responsibility, as well as that power, lies in our hands.  Therefore, the most important aspect of one’s practice is to practice recognition of the nature of phenomena, of the emptiness of all that is; to practice recognition of cause and effect relationships; to practice recognition of the faults of samsara; to practice recognition of the difference between what is ordinary and what is the miraculous activity of the Buddhas.  To practice this kind of recognition is the point, and it’s included in the book practices that we do.  That is as much our practice as reading these prayers is — more so, because if you were to practice this state of recognition without having a book – let’s say you were a prisoner, and you couldn’t get your books – you could still practice a state of recognition.  You could still learn to practice the View.  You could still examine your habitual tendencies.  You could still reorient your intentions and your understanding.  There’s so much that you can do.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Challenge the Appearances

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Since you were young and you figured out that it was very bad to get caught, that idea has never changed. Literally, once that idea is there, it’s in you.  You have that idea.  Why go back and challenge it?  Because it isn’t true.  We have to overcome that childish, immature part of us that we have preserved. You’re not only in trouble when you get caught; you’re in trouble when you’re in a state of non-recognition.  You’re in trouble when you’re asleep, spiritually speaking.  So why are we thinking in that same childish way?  Because it is also human nature, and we have to observe this about ourselves, that in certain ways, we’re incredibly lazy.

We like to keep really busy to reach a goal because we want that, but when it comes to backtracking and reevaluating an old conceptual scenario, like “it’s only trouble when you get caught,” we’re not going to do that unless we are pushed to do it.  We’re not going to do that because we already did it.  Why do it again?

In order to practice effectively, you must go back and challenge all things samsaric, all conceptual proliferation.  Instead of going through the rest of our lives in a childlike way, we have to go back and reevaluate, and you know how childlike we are about this.  We don’t want to get caught.  We don’t want to get in trouble.  We don’t want people to think badly of us, so we work very hard at this.  Instead of staying in that childish place, which only reinforces the idea of self-nature as inherently real, ego-cherishing, ego-clinging and the division between self and other, why not go back and challenge appearances?  Why not go back and reevaluate and ask yourself: what is the nature of suffering?  Where does the suffering come from?  Does it come from getting caught?

If you are gifted with the ability to impress people with how cool and attractive and wonderful you are, and yet within your mind, you’re basically a schmuck, constantly in judgment of others, constantly uncaring about others, constantly in a state of non-recognition, constantly fearful, angry, not compassionate, just your average, ordinary, mid-grade schmuckness on the inside but on the outside it’s not visible, then you have the greatest obstacle of all.  I am so sorry for you.  I’ll do anything I can to help you work through that, but it’s not going to work unless you work through it with me.  It’s much easier to be a student if you’re somebody like a recovering alcoholic and know that people have seen you vomit.  You have gotten to the bottom and it was nasty and dirty and there was no way you could avoid it.  I have more hope for the practitioner that one day decided to practice because they woke up in a pool of their own vomit than I do the practitioner that wants to practice because they want to be a Buddhist.  You think about that.  To come to the point where you really deal with yourself, with the appearances that you are putting forth, and discriminate between that, and just faking your way through.  This is really quite a different level of depth, isn’t it?

You have to ask yourself: remaining in a state of non-recognition, acting outwardly as though you have some answers, what do you think the result will be?  Why wait for me to tell you?  What do you think the result will be?  Assuming that the seed and the fruit are the same, that the seed produces the appropriate fruit and not a different kind of fruit, what do you think is going to happen?  Do you think your life will have less suffering in it, or more?  So much more.  But to be in a state where you’ve seen that there is some flaw here, that there’s something wrong here, then there is a kind of self-honesty that you have attained.  In the case of the recovering alcoholic, maybe you come to the point where you say, “Well, anywhere I go from here is up,” that is a very valuable point because at that point you’re not faking it.  You’re not in a place where you’re saying, “Oh, if I act this way, then I’ll be this way.”  Having fallen so far to where you’ve bottomed out and really recognize the faults of samsara, when you begin to engage mindfulness, it won’t be an external acting.  It will be more of an internal engagement, or an internal awareness.

It’s that kind of thoughtfulness, mindfulness, and recognition that must be part of our practice.  If we had been born in a culture where spiritual progression and realization were not only valued but eventually expected, we wouldn’t have to be told this, just as in a materialistic society we don’t have to be told that you have to train for your profession.  We would automatically, by reading these texts, understand that it is pointless to read the prayers, even if you read them so well and you are so cool when you read them.  If you have no understanding of their meaning or if you are insincere about this recitation, there’s just no point.  To realize that the point is to actually awaken, to move into a state of recognition, one would practice differently than if one’s understanding was that you had to do a certain amount of practice in order to be a really cool guy, or in order to be successful at Buddhism.  Do you see the difference?  One is about mind training, and the other is about samsara.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Bring the Sacred Into Your Life

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Oftentimes we run into this terrible, terrible, tragic separation in our lives, don’t we?  Where this is this thing, and that’s the sacred.  This is the life, and that’s the sacred.  The way that we practice is by saying, “Okay, here’s how I’m doing on my path.  I’ve got this practice and that practice and this practice, and I’ve accumulated 30,000 prostrations, so that’s how I’m doing on my path.” Then we have our lives, and we say, “Oh, am I  making lots of money?  Do I have a good family situation?  Do I have good relationships, good friends?  Do I have a good social life?  Am I cool?”  Mostly,  “Am I cool?  Am I in?  Am I happening?  Am I loved by everybody?  Do I get enough approval?  Do you all care for me enough?”  We’ll say,  “Okay, I’ll go practice Guru Rinpoche over here.”  You visualize Guru Rinpoche in the sky with diamonds, right?   You’re visualizing Guru Rinpoche in the sky like a cartoon, and you do that for 20 minutes or a half an hour, two hours, and that’s your practice.  Then you walk out of that, and you forget everything.  You forget everything.  And then, in the rest of your life you think, “I’m not making enough money. How am I going to do this?  How am I going to pay this bill?”   And you get all tense and wound up and  think, “I’ve got to run over here, I’ve got to run over there. I’ve got to have this relationship or that relationship.”  So you’re okay with your practice, but stuff’s not going too well for you out here.  Why do you think that is?

Here’s why it is: because Guru Rinpoche is not in your life because there is non-recognition.  You are just floundering in a state of non-recognition.  There can be no blessing if you’re not looking for it.  There can be no recognition if you do not establish it.  No one can shove it down your throat, and it’s not going to magically appear in front of you.  If you do have a vision of some deity or something like that, that’s probably because you did well in your practice, but that doesn’t mean that you wait for the next time for the deity to show up before you think of the deity again. It’s up to us to make our life sacred.

As we are thinking, “Why don’t I have enough money, gotta get more money, gotta get a better job, gotta do this, that and the other thing, why isn’t this happening?”  The Buddha taught you why this isn’t happening: you’re not practicing generosity.  You’re not practicing bodhicitta, or at least in the past you did not practice generosity and bodhicitta, and so the seed that creates the fruit of prosperity was not there.  Your opportunity, then, is to begin to practice generosity, to begin to practice bodhicitta in your ordinary life.

Start small.  It’s best that way.  Start small and work your way big because when we start small, we learn.  It’s kind of like when you’re exercising, if you do a great, big, giant, heavyweight workout the first time, you’ll never do it again because the pain will kill you. You think, “I’ll never do this again.” and then you wait three weeks and by that time it’s all gone.

My suggestion is that you start to practice things like mindfulness and generosity in a small way.  If you have two dollars, buy somebody a cup of coffee or something with one of them.  If you have three dollars, give one of them to somebody that needs it more than you do, like the temple, or put it aside for a donation or something like that.  Start in that small way, making that kind of generosity and offering part of your life to bring the sacred into your life. It also changes the actual conditions of your life, because really, according to the teachings, if we find that we are poor and then somehow we get a better job and maybe the money situation works out, that cure is not permanent.  The poverty will return, either in this life, by you losing that job, or in a future life by the condition simply returning, and we may not understand why.  That mindfulness, that spiritual distinction, has to be embedded in our lives.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

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