Tibetan Buddhist Altar

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

All of our suffering is brought about because we have desire in our mindstreams.  Having desire, we have attachment and aversion, hope and fear. Examine your own thoughts.  Every one of them is either a thought of hope or a thought of fear.  There isn’t one that doesn’t have as an underlying cause of hope or fear, attraction or aversion.  Every one.  That is the way the mind of duality works.  So all of the experiences that we have, according to the Buddha, are caused by the karma of desire.  Making wishing prayers to return in a form in which you can benefit beings purifies the mind of desire.  You will find that desire rules your mind less and less. Compassion is the great stabilizer of the mind.

Never stop cultivating aspirational Bodhicitta.  While you are practicing aspirational Bodhicitta your mind becomes firm and stabilized.  You are so on fire that you need to practice, in the same way that because you are determined to live, you always remember to breathe.  With that intensity, you should be absolutely determined to accomplish compassion and benefit all beings.  You always remember to practice and be mindful.   Then you begin to practice practical Bodhicitta.

Practical Bodhicitta has two divisions.  It has a lesser and greater division, or personal and a transpersonal division.  Compassion on the personal level is what we call ordinary human kindness.  It is invaluable.  There is never a time in your life that you should not practice ordinary human kindness.  I am sometimes dismayed at people who have a high-fallutin’ idea about compassion and how to practice the Vajrayana path, and they know how to do the proper instrumentation and they can chant and they can do all these wonderful things.  But they aren’t kind to one another.  How you can think of yourself as a real practitioner and not even be nice to the person next to you? How can you be arrogant?

Ordinary human kindness must be constantly practiced.  If you know of someone who is hungry, you should do your best to feed them.  If a starving child were in front of you, wouldn’t you feed him or her?  If someone that you loved really was lonely, wouldn’t you try to help them?  Of course, these are ordinary human kindnesses.  We’re not even perfect in that, are we?  I mean, we let ourselves and our families down.  We let everybody down on a regular basis.  Sometimes ordinary human kindness is impossible to achieve.

Ordinary human kindness is not lesser in its fabric or nature, but it touches less people.  For instance, let’s say you needed a friend. If I were to stay with you for some period of time, we would talk and we would share. Maybe I would teach you to meditate, if I were to discover that you’re the kind of person that would really respond to that.  But if I don’t do that, maybe I’ll have the time to teach a large group of people. Essentially I might be able to benefit many people as opposed to benefiting one person, even though you are very important and precious to me.  Yet even teaching a larger group of people is actually an intermediate level of practice. There are only so many people that can fit in this room and can be taught.

What is the highest level of compassion?  What is the highest level of Bodhicitta?  You have to go back to the Buddha’s teaching to figure this one out.  The Buddha says that all sentient beings are suffering and that there is an end to suffering and that the end to suffering is enlightenment.  That’s the only true end to suffering.  If you fed every one that’s hungry everyday and provided them each with a companion so that they’re never lonely, gave them nice clothes, they still will experience old age, sickness and death.  There’s nothing you can do about that.  And you have no control over how they will be reborn in their next incarnation.  They could come back in a form in which they still suffer.  The only end to suffering is to eradicate the cause of suffering from the mindstream.

The root cause of all suffering is the belief in self-nature as being inherently real. It’s the mother of all-pervasive desire in the mindstream.  The children are hatred, greed and ignorance.  The mind of duality causes us to act in certain ways that create the karma so that our lives manifest in certain ways.  If we suffer from hunger or old age or sickness or death, whatever it is that we suffer from, the root cause for those sufferings is the belief that self-nature is inherently real. How can you possibly uproot all of that from your mindstream?  How can you rid the very seed of suffering from your mindstream?  According to the Buddha, that is to achieve enlightenment.  To help sentient beings remove these causes from their mindstreams, we must ourselves first achieve enlightenment.  The purpose of self, which is to achieve enlightenment, is the same as the purpose of other, which is to achieve enlightenment.  They are the same, in the same way that we are non-dual, these purposes are non-dual.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

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

In the Vajrayana tradition one contemplates very deeply on certain thoughts before you ever go on to any deeper practice, and these thoughts are called the ‘Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind.’  The idea is that your mind becomes turned in such a way that your intention to practice is firm, like a rock.  If you were wishy-washy about why you should practice meditation, your meditation will be wishy-washy.  There’s no doubt about it.  If you were convinced that your job could bring you more eternal and natural happiness than enlightenment, you would practice your job with greater fervor than you would practice enlightenment.  Therefore you try to turn your mind so that it has a firm foundation, hard as a rock, upon which you can build your practice.

It’s that way with aspirational Bodhicitta.  You have to turn your mind in such a way that you understand the value of compassion and you have to actually ignite your mind.  You have to set it on fire, and that fire has to be stronger and hotter and fiercer than any other feeling or idea that you have.  It has to burn so strongly that you can’t put it out.

In order to practice aspirational Bodhicitta, you must first of all look around you with courage.  Because we Americans, even New Age Americans, don’t like to look around and see that others are suffering.  We hate to think about that.  We think somehow it’s bad to think like that. According to the Buddha, it isn’t bad to think like that.  In fact, you must think like that in order to go on to the next level of practice.  You must look around you and be honest and be courageous. If you don’t see suffering in your life, if you don’t know that the people around you are lonely or getting old or getting sick, that they live with worry and with fear, then what you need to do is go to the library and check out books about other cultures and other forms of life, and see what the rest of the world is like.  Have you ever seen pictures of Calcutta, India?  Have you ever seen pictures of Bangladesh?  Have you ever seen pictures of Africa?  If you don’t believe that suffering exists in the world, you’ll see it there.  Have you ever studied the lives of people who continually do non-virtuous activity? Even though they might look like they’re tough and in control, they are deeply suffering. It behooves you to be courageous enough to examine that.  You should look at other life forms. You should look at animals.  You should look and see how oxen are treated in India.  I speak of India a lot, not because it’s a bad place, but because I’ve been there, and I was shocked.  I had no idea how sheltered Americans are from suffering.  I had no idea until I saw lepers in the street with no limbs and with open sores.

Having studied these things, you will come to understand that there is suffering in the world.  You should cultivate in your heart and mind a feeling of great compassion. You shouldn’t stop until you’ve come to the point that you are on fire and you cannot bear that they are suffering so much.  The Buddha says that we have had so many incarnations in so many different forms that every being you see, every one, has been your mother or your father.    Whether you believe that or not, it’s a great way to think.  Because you look at other beings and see how they are suffering helplessly, with no way to get out of it.  And that they, at one time, had given you birth.  In that way, you can come to love them in a way that you can practice for them.

You should allow yourself to become so filled with the urgency to practice loving that your heart is on fire and there’s no other subject that interests you as much.  Even if it’s uncomfortable; we Americans think we should never be uncomfortable. Sometimes discomfort is very useful.  Be uncomfortable and let yourself ache with the need to practice Bodhicitta.  Cultivate in yourself that urgency and that determination.  You might get to the point where you feel something, and you feel sort of sorry for all sentient beings.  You might think, “Okay, now I’ve got it.  I’ll go on to the next step.”  No, you haven’t got it.  You should cultivate compassion from this moment until you reach supreme enlightenment.

Unless they are supremely enlightened no one is born with the perfect mind of compassion.  I, and everyone I teach and everyone I know, including my teachers, practice aspirational Bodhicitta everyday, reminding ourselves that all sentient beings suffer unbearably and that we find it unbearable to see.  You should continue to cultivate compassion every moment of your life. It will begin to burn in your heart. It’s like love.  It’s beautiful.  You won’t want ever to be without that divine fire in your heart.  It will warm you as no other love can.  It will stabilize your mind as no other practice can.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo