Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Your Guru

by
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.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Purifying One’s Intention

by

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

Another aspect of our Ngöndro practice is purification, the prayers to Vajrasattva. How would it be if we were to sit for maybe an hour and practice the purification and confession of Vajrasattva and accumulate the mantra and then just put our books aside and consider it’s over?  That’s it.  I confessed.  I said all the prayers, the short ones and the long ones, short confession, long confession.  Remember, if you practice like that, you never have to revisit it again.  It’s a lazy, cop-out way to practice.

Instead, we should think, “I’m deeply involved in the practice of purification and confession which does not stop at the end of my practice.”  There are so many ways to practice that kind of purification: by being mindful, by making offerings in the way that I’ve described, by moving into a state of better recognition about what is precious and what is ordinary, and ultimately moving into the state of Recognition of the nature of all phenomena.  Automatically one is constantly purifying the senses, constantly purifying one’s intention, which is the very thing that needs purifying even more than everything else.  If we practice in that way as we’re walking around, it complements any confessional prayers that we make.

In most of the confessional prayers, if you really read the meaning and content of the prayers, there is talk about broken samaya in the confessional prayers.  Nobody really knows what that means.  Does that mean you didn’t do your mantra today?  Well, maybe on one level it means that, but on a deeper level, it is referring to the state of non-recognition.  So in everything that we do, if we continually make offerings, as we continually give rise to a deeper Recognition, then the five senses are being purified constantly. The habit that I’m suggesting you develop will antidote the automatic reaction that is so natural for us, so habitual.   Remember, we can insert this way of thinking or this way of practicing because we are human.

I really like animals, but one thing I’ve noticed about animals, even if they are trainable and very smart, they cannot change or alter the way they perceive their environment.  They can’t do that.  The dog can’t say, “Wait a minute, before I lift that leg, let’s think about the nature of that fire hydrant.”  The dog is not capable of this.  You are.  That is one of the great blessings of being a human being, and yet the habits that we tend to cultivate are the habits that you don’t even need to be a human being to do: that habit of automatically reacting, not taking oneself in hand, not creating any kind of space or a moment where we can Recognize the nature of reality, not making any offerings.  We tend to just automatically move through life like an automaton, like a robot.

However, being human, we can develop a little bit of space in our minds to antidote that constant clinging and reactivity, and yet we’re all about collecting things.  Well, you know, crows collect things.  We’re all about having relationships.  Well, even animals can bond for life.  We’re all about having children.  Well, dogs and cats do that, too.  Isn’t it wonderful that here in Dharma practice, if we choose to, if we practice sincerely, we can do that which only humans can do?  How amazing!

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Purification of Moral Conduct

by

Vajrasattva

The following is a prayer from the Bodhisattva Vow Ceremony as translated in the Nam Cho Daily Practice book from Palyul Ling International:

Prostrate to all the Tathagatas!

Prostrate to Bodhisattva Mahasattva Avalokiteshvara!

OM AH MO GHA SHI LA SAMBHARA SAMBHARA BHARA BHARA MAHASHUD DHA SATO PEMA BHI BHU KHE TE BU DZA DARA DARA SAMANTA AVALOKETE HUNG PHET SOHA (repeat 21 times)

May the Dharma of the perfection of moral self-discipline be thoroughly complete in my and all sentient being’s mind streams!

May all non-virtuous deeds and obstructions arising from discipline broken because of defilements be cleansed and purified!

May there be the fortune of discipline pleasing to the Aryas!

May I be placed in contact with the bliss of liberation not oppressed by defilement.

May proper moral self-discipline be without faults.

May moral self-discipline be possessed purely.

And the perfection of moral self-discipline without hypocrisy be completed!

May I be trained as a follower of all the Jinas,

Completing the conduct of Samantabhadra.

May my conduct of discipline be completely immaculate!

May my moral self-discipline have the sweet essence of being well-kept!

May my conduct always be without damage and without faults!

About Wisdom

by

An excerpt from a teaching called Compassion, Love, & Wisdom by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

We are going to talk about something that is very core to the Buddha’s teaching and that you will hear about again and again as you continue to practice on the Buddha’s path. This subject is compassion. It is about love and the primordial wisdom state or true nature, and how these things relate and come together in a meaningful way.  We think wisdom is a thing that can be accumulated in the same way that we accumulate clothing or jewelry or cars, and we think that the way to accomplish wisdom is to keep on learning more and more.  We think wisdom is a series of facts or items that we can learn and list. But wisdom is something quite different in Buddhist philosophy.

Wisdom is less like something that you can accumulate; it is more like the realization of what is pure and natural, what underlies the phenomena that we create and the conceptual proliferation that is the mindstream we experience.  Wisdom is the realization of the emptiness of self-nature and the emptiness of all phenomena. Thus the popular idea that we as Westerners have of accumulating wisdom is incorrect, according to the Buddha’s view.  We tend to think we will continue in a progressive way, always increasing our knowledge, always increasing our wisdom and always increasing our ability.  According to the Buddha that is not correct.  In fact the opposite is actually true.

In a sense you could say that true wisdom is the less and less you know if you think of knowing as based on some concept or idea.  The less ideation that one experiences the closer one is to the primordial wisdom state, the closer one is to the relaxation of one’s mind. That is wisdom.  We think we will necessarily become wiser as we grow older, or that we will necessarily become more knowledgeable as we gain more education.  That is not necessarily the case according to the Buddha.  The things we accumulate as we grow older aren’t wisdom at all, they are ideas.  They are conclusions; they are conceptualizations, such as the idea that as you grew older you learned to be more optimistic.  Whatever your idea is, whether it is concrete or abstract, so long as it is conceptualization, so long as it is ideation, so long as it is experienced as a concept that one forms and seems to contain itself, it is not the traditional view of wisdom.  That is considered knowledge and knowledge is something you can learn.  Even on the Buddha’s path there is tremendous value in accomplishing the scholastic knowing of the Buddha’s teaching. That kind of knowledge is important and it is one of the components of wisdom, especially if that knowledge is used to accomplish the realization of the primordial wisdom state. For example, let’s say you learn all of the philosophy of the Buddha’s path and then you learn the technology, learn how to accomplish sadhana practice and how to do puja. You learn how to practice Tsalung and you go on to all of the most profound teachings that Vajrayana Buddhism has to offer. If you learn all about those different things and you are very skilled at them, and you go on to practice them, then the knowledge that you gained becomes part of the process of gaining wisdom or of realizing the natural state. You use the skills you have accumulated through gaining knowledge in order to accomplish wisdom.  The difference is necessary to understand.

On the Mahayana path the accumulation of knowledge and the realization of the primordial wisdom state, or the realization of the natural state, are components that are interdependent. It is unlikely that you will simply be able to sit down knowing nothing about meditation and accomplish the realization of the primordial wisdom state.  It is essential to get from the teacher what is necessary – the skills. It is necessary to get from the Buddha the milk, the nurturing of his direction and his teaching so that we can accomplish the Dharma. But true wisdom is understood not as something that one can collect, but as the realization of the natural state. That is the goal of the Buddha’s teaching.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Developing Spiritual Discrimination

by

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

One of the things that is very unique about the Buddhadharma is that it is not a “Sunday-go-to-meeting” religion.  It’s not the kind of religion where you go on Sunday and Christmas and Easter, or whatever your particular holiday happens to be, and the rest of the year you’re just where you are.  Buddhism is different in that it is a path.  In a way, it is a nonreligious religion.  You have to think of it as a path that one walks consistently, faithfully, and deeply.  There is relatively little benefit from practicing Dharma in a superficial way.  Learning one or two mantras and walking around saying some prayers but not really training the mind in a deep and profound sense of the View will be a lot less effective. Also, our tendency is to become dry, and not remain moist on the path.  The heart dries up.  If there is no profound investment in establishing the View and establishing mindfulness, the result will be greatly weakened, greatly crippled.

Mindfulness is one of those subjects that one can take to the depths of one’s practice and its many aspects display themselves in different kinds of practice.  Before I talk about the first aspect of mindfulness, let me address some difficulties we have as Westerners, particularly. Because of the very nature of our culture, there are so many different things to do, and we are inundated with philosophies and religions, both old and new.  We are inundated with different kinds of experiences that people call “spiritual.”  The reason I’m so mindful of this is because I lived in Sedona, Arizona, and Sedona is known for that.  People mistake any kind of experience that feels deep as a “spiritual” experience, not able to discriminate between something that feels spiritual and something that is an actual commitment and movement on one’s path.  There really is a difference between a mantra and a backrub!  There really is a difference between the various experiences that people have that they call spiritual and an actual path that one practices consistently with the intention of benefiting beings.  This lack of spiritual discrimination is the greatest problem that we have in the West.  You can see how it is symbolically, even to go the grocery store.  If you send your child to the grocery store to buy bread, you’ll have to specify what kind of bread, what brand of bread, because on the shelf are a million different kinds of bread.  Other cultures might be a little bit different than that, especially third world cultures.  There, when you go to buy bread, you buy the bread they have, and that’s pretty much it.  Bread is bread.  In the same way, their faith is their faith.  It’s not something that one tastes and tries and then tries something else.  That discrimination is sort of built into the culture.  We don’t have that, so our need to practice discrimination is much stronger.  We have a tremendous need for that.

Discrimination is best practiced through changing one’s habitual tendency.  On the path of Buddhadharma, if you really step back from it and look at the different categories of practice, you’ll notice that, basically, the Buddhadharma is about applying the actual, exact antidote to the subtle and gross forms of suffering that we endure.  The Buddha has taught us that we suffer mostly from desire and that suffering is ongoing and that it is all-pervasive.  But we also notice that that desire takes many forms, so there are practices in the Buddhadharma that are meant to specifically pacify pride and ego and that ego-clinging self-cherishing.  There are practices in the Dharma that are meant to apply the exact antidote to a lack of generosity, to selfishness and greediness and just wanting, wanting, wanting — that kind of suffering.  There are practices in the Buddhadharma that are meant to help us shake ourselves out of the kind of slothful mental attitude that so many of us have which is a kind of sleepwalking that we do through the days and years of our lives.  This is actually a quality of mind and in Buddhism it’s labeled ignorance.  Ignorance is not lack of education in Buddhism; it’s lack of wisdom.   For that reactive or  slothful mind, where the mind doesn’t stop and evaluate and use its energy to determine whatever direction it’s going in, in the Buddhadharma there are antidotes to that as well.

In fact, when you study the Buddhadharma, you really have to think about the Buddha as being like a doctor and samsara as being like the sickness and the Dharma as the nurse that feeds the medicine to you all the time.  So in this spiritual discrimination, it isn’t a theoretical, vague idea.  This ideal of mindfulness, of discrimination, actually needs to be practiced in a very exacting way, for the very reason that we are in a culture that goes in exactly the opposite direction.  We are in a culture that does not teach discrimination, really, in any form, particularly about spiritual issues.

How can we practice spiritual discrimination?  How can we formulate that by which we can begin to grow the ability to distinguish?  How can we learn to discriminate between what is truly of the mind of the Buddhas and what is ordinary and simply arising from the phenomena of samsara? What is the method by which we can actually establish the View?  In the Buddhadharma, we are always looking to apply an exact antidote.  You have to think about samsara as being like a poison and that there is an exact formula that is the antidote to that poison.  In trying to develop discrimination and mindfulness, it is best to hold ourselves to a kind of ritual or task that is evident and visible.  One of the strongest antidotes to being stuck on the idea of self-nature as being inherently real, (which is really quite different from enlightenment) and for lack of spiritual discrimination – not being able to tell, in a spiritual sense, the difference between a diamond and a piece of cut glass — is called Guru Yoga.

Guru Yoga on the Vajrayana path is extraordinarily important.  It is not important because the Guru needs it nor because it’s even pleasant or fun for the Guru.  It is not for any ridiculous or stupid reason like that.  The reason that we practice Guru Yoga is because our minds, when they are samsaric and therefore fully engaged in the cycle of birth and death, are a little bit deadened, sort of flat-line.  Just the energy or pulse of engaging in a relationship between oneself, which appears separate, and other, constantly creates a feedback loop that makes for a kind of dullness and stupor.  This non-recognition of phenomena as actually being a display of our own mindstreams keeps the mind deadened to the View.  In that state, it is so like us to take a spiritual minister or presenter of some kind and, because they have tremendous charisma and slick words, because they have a real routine going, we would put them in high regard and think, “Oh, this must be the Word of God,” or  “This must be the Word of Spirit.”  There is the inability to discriminate between that and a very deep practitioner, a silent bodhisattva (one who has not been publicly recognized).  If a silent bodhisattva were to walk into the room, we wouldn’t sense that.  We wouldn’t know what that was because there’s no display, no show.  One of the methods that we use is this throne on which I sit, and it is not because I like it.  Actually, it’s kind of uncomfortable.  This throne is not here because it’s pretty, and it’s not here for any superficial reason.  The Lama sits higher in order to indicate to the student the difference between this speech and the speech we hear every day.  So in your mind, in the student’s mind, the throne is high, and it’s a reminder for you.  This is a clear indication that in our lives we need some kind of ritual or some kind of visible habitual pattern that we engage in, in order to develop true spiritual discrimination.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Request to Remain Firm

by

The following is a prayer from the Nam Chö Daily Practice Book from Palyul Ling International:

As the single source of benefit and bliss,
May the doctrine remain in this world indefinitely and
May those of supreme birth who uphold the precious doctrine,
Live long firm lives like banners of victory!
May the lives of the glorious spiritual teachers be firm and
May all sentient beings, who are equal in number to space, be well and happy.
Through myself and all others, accumulating merit and cleansing obscurations,
May we quickly be placed on the stage of Buddhahood.
I pray that the spiritual teachers may enjoy excellent health.
I pray for their supreme long life as well.
I pray that their enlightened activities may spread forth and expand.
Grant blessings to never be separated from my spiritual teachers.
May myself and limitless beings without exception,
By the root of this very virtue,
Completely cleanse the karmic negativities and obscurations of all lifetimes,
And be liberated in the expanse of the profound Dharma treasury.

The Emanation of Primordial Wisdom

by

The following is a teaching given live by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo at Kunzang Palyul Choling in Poolesville, Maryland on May 22, 2016

 

Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo gives a pith teaching on how Primordial Wisdom displays to us. She concludes with stories about the bear that’s tearing up the fence.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo All Rights Reserved

Incense Offering

by

The following is a prayer from the Namchö Daily Practice Book from Palyul Ling International:

TSUL TRIM DRI DEN PÖ CHOG DAM PA DI
This pure supreme incense, which bears the scent of pure moral self-discipline,

TING DZIN NGAG DANG CHAG JYAI JYIN LAB KYI
By the blessings of mantra, mudra and samadhi

SANG GYÉ SHING DU PÖ DRI NGED DANG WA
Is offered to the realms of the Buddhas. May this fragrant incense

GYAL WA GYA TSÖI TSOG NAM NYE GYUR CHIG
Completely please and satisfy the ocean-like assembly of Buddhas!

NAMA SARWA TATHAGATA BENZA DUPE PRATITSA PUDZA MEGHA SAMUDRA SA PHA RA NA SAMAYE AH HUNG

Prayer to Manjushri

by

Prayer To Manjushri

Obeisance to my Guru and Protector, Manjushri,

Who holds to his heart a scriptural text symbolic of his seeing all things as they are,

Whose intelligence shines forth as the sun, unclouded by delusions or traces of ignorance,

Who teaches in sixty ways with the loving compassion of a father for his only son,

All creatures caught in the prison of samsara, confused in the darkness of their ignorance, overwhelmed by their suffering.

You, whose dragon thunder-like proclamation of Dharma, arouses us from the stupor of delusions

And frees us from the iron chains of our karma, who wields the Sword of Wisdom

Hewing down suffering wherever its sprouts appear, clearing away the darkness of ignorance.

You whose princely body is adorned with the 112 marks of a Buddha, who has completed the stages achieving the highest perfection of a Bodhisattva, who has been pure from the beginning.

OM AH RA PA TSA NA DHI
(Repeat the mantra many times through. The last time:
DHI DHI DHI DHI DHI…..SOHA)

I bow down to you, O Manjushri. With the brilliance of your wisdom, O Compassionate One,

Illuminate the darkness enclosing my mind.

Enlighten my intelligence and wisdom so that I may gain insight

Into Buddha’s words and the texts that explain them.

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com