Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Experience the “Lotus” of Dharma

January 17, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

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.

Astrology for 1/17/2016

January 17, 2016 by Norma

1/17/2016 Sunday by Norma

An expense or charge that you thought was forgotten comes due today, with good results. Paying what you owe opens the door to excellent things, so pay up cheerfully! This is a good day to receive inspiration from out of the blue, seemingly, that actually is the result of your own generosity. Material objects are important; look at items carefully to assess quality. Take what’s good and leave the rest. Pubilius Syrus said, “Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.” Elsewhere, a joyous message or happy time with others is fun and inspiring. It’s a great day to travel, to notice your surroundings and to enjoy others. Evade direct questions regarding commitment to future activities, another week will pass before you are ready to plan ahead..

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see where this message impacts your life!

On The Suffering of Beings

January 16, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

A slideshow compiled by a student of dharma who was inspired by the compassion retreats of Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, founder of Kunzang Palyul Choling:

The music accompanying this video is a prayer offered by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo for the benefit of any being who is suffering (human or non), especially those suffering from illness or death. More information on this prayer and a download link can be found here: https://www.tibetanbuddhistaltar.org/prayer-to-be-reborn-in-dewachen/

Astrology for 1/16/2016

January 16, 2016January 16, 2016 by Norma

1/16/2016 Saturday by Norma

Consider your options carefully today, two doors are possible. Door one represents a calculated, fearful way of doing things. Door two represents optimism and broad-based hope for the future. Take door two, please. Shoot for the stars, not for the 7-11 next door. A Navajo Blessing says, “May you walk in beauty on a rainbow trail and dwell in the house of happiness with beauty all around you.” Think big! Be happy as you go about the business of cleaning up issues from the past. What’s good today? Tending to matters in a pleasant manner, household maintenance, fixing things, caring for pets, employees, health and preparing for the future. You want to be ready when that important moment comes!

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see where this message impacts your life!

Astrology for 1/15/2016

January 15, 2016 by Norma

1/15/2016 Friday by Norma

A buoyant spirit pervades the environment, causing people to tap their toes and zip around excitedly. Avoid sedentary work, your fidgeting will drive everyone nuts. Be out and about! This is the day to run errands, marathons and roadblocks! A joyous spirit brings fun and laughter into everything you do. Use the happiness to tackle, respectfully, your toughest jobs, and be amazed at the results! It’s an expansive time. Anonymous said, “He who makes room in his heart for others, will himself find welcome accommodation everywhere.” Be open, friendly and accepting with everyone you meet. Yes, you’re still solving issues from the past, but that doesn’t mean you need to bring old attitudes with you.

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see how this message impacts your life!

True Refuge

January 14, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The Buddha is the Master who reveals the true Refuge, and the Sangha is like a true friend on the path to Enlightenment. The actual refuge is the Dharma, because it is the Dharma that will free us and pacify suffering. The absence of or freedom from delusion is cessation. If we do not apply the antidote to our faults and delusions they continue to arise. But after the remedy, if the delusion is totally uprooted, it will never rise again. That state, free from delusion and the stains of the mind is a cessation. Bottom line- anything we wish to abandon like suffering and its causes, can be eliminated by applying the opposite forces. The final cessation is called Nirvana, or Liberation.

The Buddhas, fully enlightened ones are inconceivable, as is the Dharma, their teaching. The Sangha is also inconceivable so if you develop inconceivable faith there is no doubt the result will be inconceivable. It is said in our scriptures that if the benefit of sincerely taking refuge in the Three Jewels could be measured in relative, physical terms, the entire Universe would not be able to contain its value just as a great ocean cannot be measured in a tea cup.

Having learned the value and benefit we should rejoice in the opportunity to make offerings to and take Refuge in the Three Precious Jewels of Liberation. Here in this way we will be able to alleviate the influences of our negative actions as well as karmic obstructions. All these can and will be eliminated, and we all will be counted as sublime beings, which will surely please the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and our own kind Gurus and Lineage Masters!

It is this we should focus on, not the ego or our pridefulness for results. The consequences of karma are definite. Negative actions bring suffering, always. And positive actions bring happiness and freedom, always even a small action can bring a large consequence; so mindfulness is required. And the ability to examine ourselves honestly is essential to all spiritual progress!

To all spiritual progress!

OM MANI PEDME HUNG!

OM AH MI DEWA HRI!

Pure Form – Deity Generation

January 14, 2017January 14, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

We are involved in Vajrayana. We go much further in our practice than this thinking about nature and this going around in circles and this logic and this theory and this philosophy. We go further than that. We actually engage in practices in which one generates oneself as a pure consciousness form, which is the deity or the particular Buddha that you generate yourself as when you do your practice.

Let’s say that you generate yourself as Chenrezig. Chenrezig is a pure consciousness form. He displays and demonstrates all the pure qualities and activities associated with the deity. The emphasis associated with Chenrezig is indicated by his posture, his color and the things that he’s holding in his hands. In generating ourselves as this pure deity form, we have in our hearts the seed syllable surrounded by the mantra. The seed syllable, the mantra and the deity all emerge spontaneously out of shunyata, or the void.

We do this in Vajrayana to indicate something that is a very important aspect of this teaching and of our practice. First, it is important to understand the philosophy and the logic associated with the Buddha’s teaching because [then] one can knock down the dependency on the perception that defines self and other. One can break up a good deal of the rigidity associated with the automatic involvement in these extensions and exaggerations of perception. One can break up the experience of perception itself through meditating and contemplating on the illusory quality of self-nature. One can meditate on emptiness and try to find self in every object in the world and, perhaps when one is finished, one can lay down the game in a sense. After doing all this, one would have attained a certain degree of awareness of emptiness and also an awareness of the emptiness of self-nature, and an awareness of the emptiness of the nature of phenomena. Then one’s mind could become stable in that it would not be so automatically involved in the processes that are functions of the assumption of self. Yet, is that the same as supreme realization? Is that as far as it goes? Do you break down things, and after you’ve broken them down, sort of sit there with them?

Perhaps we can come to understand that, in Vajrayana, we are given something else, and that something else is very hard to describe. It is recommended that we do the above process, but it’s also recommended that we meditate on shunyata. It’s recommended that from that meditation on shunyata we arise spontaneously as this pure form. What is a pure form? A pure form is actually a form that is an illusory image of a self, an entity, which is based on the assumption of emptiness. It is not based on the assumption of self. You are based on the assumption of self. Everything about you is based on the assumption of self. All your karma is based on the assumption of self. Everything you see, everything you feel is based on the assumption of self. But this pure deity form arises from shunyata and arises as the seed syllable, as the mantra and as the form itself, bearing all the pure qualities, all the pure attributes and all the pure activities of an illusory, gossamer-thin form that arises based on the assumption of emptiness.

So we do not stop with the assumption of emptiness or with breaking up the ordinary view and perceptions; but rather, we, in generating ourselves as the deity, have an even more profound experience of emptiness. Because the deity arises from the voidness, shunyata, you should meditate on emptiness before you generate yourself as the deity. The seed syllable that is the first birth is the condensation of the body, speech and mind of such a pure form. It is based on the assumption of emptiness. It has in it all the qualities that arise spontaneously from that awakened state, condensed into the seed syllable. The mantra is the same, having all the activities and qualities that arise spontaneously from this empty state, from shunyata. So from that, we are led to believe that one should not stop merely at breaking things down so that the game no longer computes, but that there is a more profound state. There is a more profound awareness that allows for miraculous birth. It allows for a miraculous birth in order to bring about miraculous activity, in order to demonstrate miraculous qualities such as compassion, which is completely consistent with emptiness, the same as emptiness, united with emptiness, inseparable from emptiness. Through this practice, through this miraculous birth, we actually purify our perception. Not through breaking down the game alone, but through actually utilizing these condensed manifestations of emptiness, one’s perception is purified to realize the illusory quality of all phenomena, to realize the union, the sameness of formless and form, to realize the spontaneity of experience and to realize also the infallibility of pure view.

You should then practice every single practice that you do, and examine for yourself and contemplate and meditate as you have been instructed, with the understanding that in every generation, in every accumulation of any kind, you should try to realize the profound, incredible opportunity, if you will, to go beyond that into the astonishing pure view and to realize for yourself that the generation of the deity is the same as emptiness.The deity arises from emptiness, it indicates the assumption of emptiness and that you also arise from emptiness. Yet the mistake that you make is the assumption of self. Every compulsion comes from that. Every perception comes from that. Every experience that you have and all experiences that you have had are artificial constructions that come from that. Every piece of your lives, your experience, your consciousness, even the senses, if you think this way, cannot be trusted, because they are based on a false assumption.

This is why you have the opportunity to generate yourself as the deity and to practice this profound method. It is so you can view the sameness, the suchness, the purity, the pristine luminosity that is the nature of all phenomena, as well as of the self. It is so you can view the indistinguishability between the two based on the assumption of emptiness.

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Perception”

Astrology for 1/14/2016

January 14, 2016 by Norma

1/14/2016 Thursday by Norma

There’s a possibility of working yourself into a tizzy and feeling indisposed today. Do what you absolutely must and shelve the rest for later, you’ll be glad you did. Listen carefully to directions and follow them precisely. Avoid the urge to change, improve or put your own spin on things-you will find yourself in big trouble if you do. A German proverb says, “He who prizes little things is worthy of great ones.” Success is likely, the result of careful attention to details. Feel free to run around dancing and singing with joy later in the day. You deserve it.

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see where this message impacts your life!

Hidden Right in Front of You

January 22, 2016January 13, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

In this excerpt from a teaching called Bodhicitta, Jetsunma speaks to her students about her recognition by His Holiness Penor Rinpoche.

The person who is practicing needs to be able to distinguish between a diamond and a rhinestone. You have to know the miraculous really exists and you have to have faith in it. Sentient beings are helpless if they’re lost in cyclic existence; they can’t make any breakthroughs. They can’t really break out by themselves. Somehow they have to receive a direct mind empowerment from someone that has made certain progress. One way that you can do that in the Vajrayana system is to take wangs and another way that you can do that is to have a kind of mind-to-mind relationship with your teacher. There is a transmission that goes on, but you have to have faith for that to happen.

His Holiness said, “I could sit there and hit you with the bumpa all day long until you are flat on your head. If you don’t have faith in the teacher, you don’t have faith in the wang, if you don’t know what’s happening, you can’t work with the wang. Your head could be flat, but nothing is going to happen.” He said you have to have to faith.

Realizing that, he and I began to talk about that, and after a while it became necessary for the recognition [editor’s note: Refers to Jetsunma’s recognition]. What does the recognition mean? I don’t know. It means nothing has changed. What’s changed? Michael, my husband, said he had an interesting kind of perception. He’s married. All of a sudden he’s married to a tulku. And I said, “All of a sudden you are married to a tulku? What were you married to before, a bran muffin? Dear friend, you were always married to a tulku.” And he said, “I think about how we used to be together before,” and I said, “We’re still doing it. I get better that now you know it?” I don’t mean to be crass. But you have to understand what is going on here. In one way, nothing has changed. The event, the real thing between us hasn’t changed. If I was your friend before, I’m your friend now, you see? If I was your teacher before, I’m your teacher now. If I was the biggest pain in the neck in your life, I’m still that now. That hasn’t changed. But now you have taken off the blinders.

What the recognition means is that you have a handle or a way to take off your blinders and to have real faith. That’s what has got to happen. This path doesn’t work without faith. It’s awful that I have to teach this to you. Somebody else should teach this to you, like a Khenpo. But this is Kaliyuga and this is the West and we’re in it together so you are just going to have to put up with it.

You have to realize that all this time the miraculous has been right in front of you and it’s part of your life. You weren’t able to realize before what an opportunity you had, but now you can realize that. It doesn’t mean that now there is a big change in your life because your teacher has been recognized as a tulku. You might think, “That means now I have to drop everything and do three prostrations first time I see her.” Well, OK, that’s what they do. That’s customary. That’s good Guru Yoga. But it’s not about what you do with your arms and legs. It’s good that you practice that because it helps you to remember. It’s not that, “Now I have to give her a cup that’s covered all the time.” These are the stupid things that people are fearful about – forgetting to give me the right kind of cup. You think that’s what it is all about. Or you think, “What if I walk into the room first and she walks behind me and I didn’t see her?” Do you know how many times that’s happened me? In India, I didn’t even know which ones were the tulkus and which ones weren’t, because I hadn’t learned them all yet. You don’t always look where you are going. I didn’t care. I was just right in there.

You make mistakes like that. That’s not what it’s all about. You shouldn’t be fearful like that. You shouldn’t be. The relationship hasn’t changed in that way. The love is still there. Everything is still the same. Now you get to realize that the miraculous activity of Guru Rinpoche is happening in your life, that you have this precious opportunity and that this is a really good time to take advantage of it.

You have the opportunity. To paraphrase, Guru Rinpoche said, “Maybe you won’t see my body, but I will come as your teachers.” When Guru Rinpoche says something like that, I believe it out of hand. When I see my teachers, I know that Guru Rinpoche is with me. That same miraculous activity is right with you. The stuff that saves is right there. What has changed is that now you have to realize and you have to practice Guru Yoga with such faith. That’s what your job is. All the great teachers have said it is so, therefore I believe it. Not only that, but I’ve seen it. That’s what it means. I haven’t changed from a caterpillar to a butterfly. I’m exactly the same as I was before. Have you noticed that?

What has changed is that you have now a way to take some blinders off and you can realize for the first time that who you thought was your best friend, is still your best friend, but in a different way. You thought you had to cling to some kind of humanity – a best friend, a sister, and comrade, somebody you could go drinking with. That’s what you thought you had to have. But that was only temporary. It was a masquerade. You still have your best friend. But now you find out your best friend is the Three Precious Jewels and it’s always been that way, except that you didn’t know it before. Now you know it. So the only thing that has changed is you. You get to take your blinders off.

You get to see that in your life right now is spontaneous, miraculous activity and that this is your time, this is your time and you can do it. Nothing’s changed except now you get to practice properly. What’s there in front of you has always been there in front of you. I didn’t become a tulku a month ago. That’s the stupidest thing you ever heard of it, isn’t it?

Try to practice Guru Yoga properly. Realize that right now, miraculous activity is in your life. The reality of non-dual mind is in your life, and it’s your best friend. It’s right in front of you. The whole visualization of Kuntuzangpo and Kuntuzangmo and what it means, it’s not just a visualization. It’s the truth. It’s really there. You have this. We have His Holiness and we have Gyatrul Rinpoche, and you have your root teacher. That means it’s for real. It’s the truth. It’s right there with you.

Sometimes I look at His Holiness and I think, “My gosh, what do I need with a visualization. I’ve got you.” It’s there, it’s right in front of me. It’s nothing that I made up. And it’s the same for you. Now you know it. That’s the only difference. Don’t be scared. You try to get it right; sure you should try to get it right. I try to get it right. But just try to realize that right now you have every reason and cause and expectation to deepen properly. You have everything you need if you just do it. What are you so distracted about? Just do what you have to do and do it now before it’s too late.

They say a door can’t chase people around the room, but I swear, I remember chasing a lot of people around the room. This may be the time you get that opportunity, so you better walk through the door really soon into deeper practice.

Where There Is Love

January 13, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

From a series of tweets from Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, December 2009

I’ve recently had the great joy of seeing Dharma students return after time away. I rejoice and welcome you home with open arms and heart!

No bridge is burned, no river damned, no journey wasted, no song unsung where there is LOVE.

No obstacles, no taint, no bitterness, no blame, no darkness where there is faith.

No sorrow, no crime, no endings, no loss, no grief, no separation when one is awake.

No fear, no hate, no confusion, no winning, no losing, no past, no future, no contrivance where there is Wisdom.

No going, no coming, no abandonment, no holding, no resentment, no attachment, no loss with Bodhicitta.