Tibetan Buddhist Altar

An excerpt from a teaching called Bodhicitta by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

One thing I like about all of you is your great compassion. You really want to help people. I’ve always loved that about you. There are some of you that are less interested than others, but everyone here really wants to help all sentient beings. But you know what? You can’t help anyone until you yourself are free of cyclic existence, because what you have there is the blind leading the blind. While you have hatred, greed and ignorance in your mind stream, you cannot help anyone. You can generate the deity all day long. You can help little old ladies cross the street all you want. You can make them bliss out and have a beautiful experience and sing songs and play music, and rub their backs and wiggle their toes and everything, but you can’t help them, because you may give them a short experience of happiness, and sometimes that’s worse because you can give them hope where there is no hope. The only hope is to break the cycle of cyclic existence and to be free of it. Sometimes the worst thing you can do for people is to give them a lot of blissful experiences, because sometimes it causes them to be satisfied and complacent and they don’t try to grow spiritually. Sometimes it can inspire them. But very often it can do the opposite.

The most profoundly beautiful thing about you is that you really want to help people. You really do. Then doesn’t it seem logical, that you would therefore take complete responsibility for your realization? If you can help somebody by achieving liberation in such a way that you can consciously reincarnate and come back in a form to teach others to achieve liberation, wouldn’t it seem rational that you would take profound responsibility for that and say, “I will do anything. So I am going to eradicate this grasping from my mind. I’m going to practice so hard and so sincerely.” And still I see people mouthing prayers. How do you do that? Still I see you trying to have a powerful experience. How can you do that? So what if you have a powerful experience? If you are going to be reborn as a cow, what’s the big deal? Is that what you want?

You have to have courage. You have to say, “I’m finished. I’m finished with all this junk that betrays me, with all of this stuff that ends up to be a bauble and nothing more with all this distraction that I’m wasting my life on. I’ve got 20 or 30 or 40 years to live. Am I going to waste it on this kind of distraction?” Just think about that. Then what will you do? You’ll have to realize the faults of cyclic existence. You’ll have to realize how impermanent it is. You’ll have to realize how fraught with pitfalls it is. You’ll have to realize how completely unconscious you are. You are tossed about. You have no control over where you are going to be born in the next incarnation. You have no control over any of that stuff until you seriously practice Dharma in such a way that you are able to break free of dualistic mind and therefore break free of the prison of samara. That’s what it takes. It’s the only thing you can do.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved

An excerpt from a teaching called Bodhicitta by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Some of you here are not young anymore. I’m not young anymore and some of you are older than me. I don’t know where you are going to be, because you have not renounced samsaric existence. I cannot guarantee that in your next incarnation you won’t be reborn as a cow because you are so ignorant. And believe me, cows in India and Nepal do not have a good life. I cannot guarantee you that you won’t be reborn as a hungry ghost because even in the presence of the Lama, even in the presence of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, even with this absolutely precious human rebirth, you are still grasping, having not renounced samsaric existence thoroughly. I cannot guarantee that you will not be reborn a hungry ghost.

Sometimes I think about those of you that are not getting any younger. That’s all of us, of course. I tend to think of the older members of the group with great love. Sometimes I lose sleep thinking about you all. That’s the truth. And I wonder, “What can we do? Maybe I’ll get them to practice Phowa really consistently, so even if they really screw up in this lifetime, at least in the bardo state there is a chance for liberation.” I think about this. Well, why aren’t you thinking about this?

You people that have the leisure to practice, where the heck are you? It doesn’t make any sense. Here is a beautiful and comfortable place to practice. You can make time to practice, and you have your teacher with you, and you have the direct empowerment of the Nam Cho lineage. Why in the world haven’t you renounced cyclic existence? Why haven’t you taken the teachings that you have now to purify your mind of grasping? You have everything. In the Ngondro practice, you have everything you need to purify your mind of grasping and need.

Now the shallowness that I hear is people doing their practice and saying, “OK, I’m going to visualize this milk coming down. Oh I feel so good that this milk is coming down.” They’re having a wonderful experience. But are they saying, “I know that my life is impermanent and I’m going to die soon. When? Ten years, 20 years, 30 years? That’s soon. And in the meantime I still have this greed in my mind. I am going to visualize that non-dual nature of Vajrasattva completely purifying me of that greed, of that grasping so that I can fully renounce cyclic existence, so that I will be safe and not imprisoned in my own dualistic mind.”

You are imprisoned in your own dualistic mind. You are not safe. I can take a running guess at how many of you will achieve liberation, if not in this lifetime, then soon, but I don’t know, because you can change that. You can break samaya with me or with any of your Vajra teachers tomorrow and that’s it. You’re a goner. Unless you fix it somehow, there’s nothing I can do for you. Then you are in the same position as everybody else. You surfaced here in this beautiful place, but where are you going to be the next time?

Death is not a beautiful experience and a release like some of the New Age metaphysicians like to pretend it is. You enter into the bardo and all the demons of your mind are there with you and unless you have enough wisdom to understand what is in front of you, you’ll throw yourself into a rebirth that’s horrible out of fear and compulsion. And you don’t know where, I don’t know where you will be next incarnation.

Now we have this wonderful manduk. Manduk is precious stuff because it absolutely ensures that you will not take a lower rebirth. Of course if you don’t have faith in it, maybe it won’t work. Your faith is everything. Do you know what makes people not have faith? Bad karma. And do you know what makes bad karma? Broken samaya. Do you see what I am saying? You’re not safe until you’re safe. A deep practitioner is one that looks at the situation and says, “Holy cow. I’ve got to do something about this and I am going to ensure that in this lifetime I am removed from cyclic existence and I am safe so that I can benefit beings and myself.”

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved

An excerpt from a teaching called Dharma of Technology by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I really hope from the depth of my heart that all of you really fully intend to accomplish Dharma. What comes to your mind when you think, “accomplish Dharma?” One of the dangers, I think, when you see monks practice in the traditional way, especially if they are really polished in their practice is that we think that must be accomplishing Dharma. We think that what accomplishing dharma is getting the hand movements right and looking very disciplined and very ordered and in sync. And it’s part of it. That is the mechanical part, the skill that is necessary. Pujas and practices, all the different kinds of practices, whether they are recitations of different kinds, the making of tormas to all of the different kinds of offerings that you would make, to accomplishing tsog properly, to doing the mudras properly. These things are all the technical side of practice and they’re all important.

There is a reason why they are in the practices that we do. They all have a specific role to play in ripening the mind. And one of the things that makes tantra tantra, is that there is this outer, inner and secret level of meaning and that there is actually a physical thing that you do in order to accomplish what you’re doing, such as making a torma or making a certain kind of food offering at the same time that you’re accomplishing on the inside. And they’re done together, hand in glove and one is meaningless without the other. Not completely in the sense that you can make an offering in your heart and if you don’t have anything physical to give, it’s still a valid offering, but still, it’s universal in the Vajrayana path that you do all these different things together. So it’s a great skill and it’s really good to learn these things and that’s part of accomplishing Dharma.

Don’t be overwhelmed by watching people play bells and damarus in sync. Don’t be overwhelmed by watching the different technical things that you can do in Dharma and think that if you could just learn to make your hands go smoothly and do all this stuff at one time or if you could learn all the different parts of puja and do them absolutely correctly, then you will automatically have accomplished Dharma. If you have any understanding of Dharma by now, you’ll understand that Dharma is in the heart.

If you have the heart of Dharma, then to accomplish the technical side of Dharma is extraordinary. If you could have both of these components, it’s extraordinary. It’s a tremendous blessing. It’s a blessing beyond description. On the other hand, if you have the heart of Dharma without the technical side, you still have the heart of Dharma and that heart remains with you. It’s not something that dies at this lifetime. It’s something that remains with you and it changes you and it brings about the results that you want. But if you only have the mechanical part of Dharma, if you only have that without the meaning, without the heart of it, then you come away unchanged, and there again you’re in danger of collecting these skills in a material way. And if you collect them in a material way, it will be like any other form of materialism. It has the danger of pride, it has the danger of greed, it has the danger of lots of different things.

Now hear me. I am not saying that you should not become proficient in accomplishing these physical parts of Dharma, but I’m saying that if you do, be certain that you don’t lose an inch, a centimeter of your understanding of what Dharma is and in fact, be sure that your understanding of the heart of Dharma increases accordingly.

I’m not saying don’t bother to learn the technical side. I hope from the depth of my heart that we can learn the technical side. I really encourage all the monks and nuns to learn the technical side of Dharma, but I warn you not to do it without the heart.

In truth I have to tell you there have been one or two of you doing the offering mudras every chance you get and I see that there is no concentration and no real fixation or stabilization of your mind so that as you do the mudras you remember that you’re actually making an offering to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas or an offering to the specific deity. I think that’s sad. I think it’s sad if you pay a lot of attention to what your hands are doing and very little attention to what your heart is doing. I think that’s kind of like a shell. Do you see what I am saying? So I think it is very important for you to accomplish Dharma from the heart.

When I say “from the heart,” I don’t mean in an emotional way. I don’t mean that you should think about Dharma in such a way that you make it into a vast, blissful experience. It isn’t like that at all. The real heart of Dharma is compassion and it’s the very hardest part. If you had a teacher that sat there beside you, you could learn all the different parts of Dharma practice and you could learn them very well. Relatively speaking, even though there is a lot to learn and even though we’re actually technically too old to start now and learn it all. But even if we could, we could accomplish it sufficiently to be pretty good at it or to look pretty good at it.

From that point of view, that kind of accomplishment is relatively easy. It’s doable. It’s doable to anyone of normal intelligence or perhaps a little bit above. But the heart of Dharma – if you sat with a teacher and yet you were not receptive or you had any of the karmic obscurations that I have described in previous teachings, it may be that you could sit with an excellent teacher for many years and never accomplish the heart of Dharma, which is compassion. Of all of the things that you can practice in Dharma, compassion is the very hardest. As a monk or nun, you can keep your vows exactly. You could read them every day and you can measure your bed and you can never clean a toilet again in your life. You could do all these things that would keep your vows exactly. But I bet anything if you examined your heart, you have not kept the bodhisattva vow for one hour.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved

An excerpt from a teaching called Perception and Karma by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, July 19, 1989

In a previous teaching we talked about the six realms of cyclic existence and how they would see a cup of water. How would the Buddha see a cup of water? The Buddha would know it’s innate nature. The Buddha would know innate nature. In that awareness there is no thirst, there is no need. There is relaxation, space, and freedom from desire. Even though the Buddha might live in a life where he drinks water, there is spaciousness in that experience, because he knows the nature. He knows the nature of desire and of thirst. He knows the nature of the experience itself. He knows the nature of the thought, “I should drink now.” In the heart of every piece of phenomena, and every single experience of any kind, is that profound nature, completely unified, completely inseparable, the same. Even to say that in the heart of that experience is that nature isn’t true. It implies that you might think of it as being like one of those chocolate covered cherries. In the heart is the nature, and the rest of it is something else. It’s not. That’s the only way we have to describe it. This that I call a cup of water is emptiness. It is emptiness. The water, the glass, the color, the taste, the desire, the need, the experience, everything is emptiness. Knowing that nature, experiencing the relaxation and spaciousness as the Buddha experiences each experience has as its core unlimited supreme bliss, bliss that is united with compassionate activity.

I am not a Buddha therefore I cannot speak as one, but a hypothetical difference may be this: I’m going to drink this because my mouth is getting dry. My mouth is getting dry because I believe in self-nature as being inherently real. My mouth can be satisfied by this water because I believe this water is other. I’m taking a drink. The Buddha experiences the nature as a result of that awakening because the very nature of that awakening is perfect compassion. The Buddha appears in the world and takes a drink of water. Within the experience of this cup, within the experience of this water, in this experience of the movement, in the experience of the decision to take the water, within the experience of being here, is the heart of emptiness and at the core, each experience is bliss. The Buddha experiences that because he knows the nature and has awakened to that nature to the extent that there is no self-craving. Therefore each experience is potentially, though it may look ordinary to you and I, potentially the experience of the primordial view, as pure, as blissful, as luminous, as inseparable from that nature in ways that we cannot understand. Yet the Buddha did come to the earth and did drink water. I assume, I wasn’t there, but I assume he did.

We, however, continue to suffer because we don’t have that space. Our minds are not relaxed. We are constantly engaged in the rigidity of reinforcing self and other and constantly at the mercy of the compulsion of our karma and constantly at the mercy of our own automatic habitual tendency to exaggerate and continue to build more suffering.

The moral of the story is, be a Buddha now. Ask me how. That is a joke, of course, but if you follow the Buddha’s teachings you are changing. You are constantly changing in the only way change is meaningful. If you really use the techniques deeply, in a contemplative way, really thinking about this, then there is hope. If you sincerely think in the ways that I’ve instructed and do the practices that you are given, you will begin to transform your awareness into the pristine, primordial experience, which is your true nature. You will have a taste of that nature and that taste will surely grow.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved

From a series of tweets by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

The thing about Dharma is how expansive it can be; and is. So many different levels, almost like a wedding cake. To trivialize one in favor of another only indicates one’s propensity toward grasping and clinging. Ego must identify itself by its “containers” of concepts and often the “structure” of Dharma is understood much better than the nectar or essence of it.

Dharma is more like a lotus. Many petals and secret, fragrant parts, the root is in the mud of samsara. Yet the nature of every atom and molecule are Buddha rising from primordial clarity. The Lotus is pure, beautiful, and fragrant; it can be understood in many ways. Many compute the facts of the image. Some feel the soft insinuation of the image. Others will want and taste the fragrance. Feel the essence of it. Touch. Hold. Meld.

We are a community of Buddhists who cannot allow each other to be one of those lotus petals while letting one be pristine, another rusted; one shiny and new, and another nearly gone. But if we could…imagine the fragrance, the mystery, the color, the goodness, the texture and perfume the Buddha Dharma could be in the West! We could all have our different little rules but the perfume of Bodhicitta, compassion, the very display of loving kindness on all levels…we can bond into a great worldwide Dharma community if we looked out for each other. Displayed the beauty, connected, not argued.

We are taught by our Lamas that all phenomena even at the most subtle levels occur on outer, inner, and secret levels. Even in traditional empowerments and pujas it is so – those three levels.

So, will we argue about the grossest outer forms? Or give rise to Bodhicitta without which no one can awaken. Will we cling to form, or will we drink deeply of the nectar that Lord Buddha and later Padmasambhava brought?

The question is like asking if you wanna go out to chow down at a restaurant? Or humbly, gratefully, at the table of the Buddhas, their daughters, and their sons?

As for me and mine, we pray and intend to feast on love.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved