Buddhism and Western Culture | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

As human beings, we avoid looking deeply at our ingrained habits and beliefs. We avoid testing them for the qualities needed to develop properly on the Vajrayana path. It’s easier to “go with the flow.” We dislike challenging ourselves. Most of all, we dislike change. We are somehow more comfortable with remnants of our old beliefs, translated into Dharma terminology.

Eastern philosophy is difficult for Westerners to understand. There are so many major differences, including the basic premise and the value system. Though the various motivations for practice set forth by the Buddha are universally true, people tend to select what resonates most with what they learned while growing up. Your culture strongly influences your reasons for practicing Dharma—and how you under-stand it. Those whose needs are generally satisfied react very differently from people who have seen war, suffering, and famine. The latter tend to hang on to Dharma for dear life. But many Dharma-practicing Westerners complacently think: “If I can just get another precious human rebirth, I’ll be okay.”

Not so for those who have seen intense suffering. They are apt to think: “I want out. I want my mind to be free of the causes of suffering. I am sick of revolving helplessly on this wheel. I’m tired of watching my loved ones go hungry and die young.” When you have seen war, you know that death could be just a moment away. But we Westerners rely on medical marvels. We have faith that if someone can just get us to the hospital in time, we will be saved.

The great blessing here in the United States is that many people have a strong karmic relationship with compassion. Thus, I talk more about compassion than about suffering. But it may not be enough to practice Dharma because you feel a sense of mission and purpose—however pure your intention might be. That is not the same as hanging on to Dharma for dear life. If you have not understood in the depths of your being how impermanent this life is, if you have not really understood the terrible prospect of revolving endlessly in cyclic existence—you tend to be much more casual in your attitude toward practice. You may not challenge yourself to do your best.

Westerners need a constant shot of inspiration. We seek it out. We eat it like candy, and we love it! But just like candy, it soon lets us down. And even if we practice with the intention to help sentient beings, there is still a catch: our practice gives us a sense of identity. Right now, your sense of identity determines why you live, what you do, what is important to you. But it also makes you a traveler who is standing still. We can move very fast in our practice and yet remain quite stiff inside. If we practice because we want to be a good person who helps others, we become comfortable with that identity. We do not feel the urgency of someone living with the constant threat of being bombed—or someone who has known hopeless hunger.

We may adopt some new ideas, but our beliefs are basically unchanged. And so is our predicament. We still believe that we will exist as we are forever, if not in the same body, then with the same consciousness. We hope to attain the goal of realization as ourselves. We believe we can keep ourselves intact, and then, we will somehow appear in a celestial form in order to benefit beings. As to what we will actually do, we vaguely envision bringing love and light to the world, the bounty of our great wisdom. And to do that, we will continue to exist in some way that is recognizable to us.

We have now come to a delicate but crucial distinction, and we must tread carefully. We pray to retain awareness throughout the process of death—so that during the bardo transference we can achieve realization or, at least, rebirth in a most fortunate way. We also want to come back in an emanation form in order to benefit beings. However, we may not yet have really challenged our ideas of foreverness and sameness. That is, we haven’t given up on ego, on surviving. This is a product of our culture. Christians aspire to survive death and go to heaven. A Buddhist, however, hopes to remain awake and not faint during the time of transference in the bardo state, but understands that what remains is not the self or the ego: it is awareness itself, the pure, essential mind-nature, unobscured, un-hindered by dirty winds and channels. It is not the natural state of you, the person you are right now. If you are hoping that this “you” will remain intact, you have a different religion programmed into your brain. The correct goal is not to survive in an eternalistic way, reaching a heaven-like Dewachen and then returning as a Buddhist angel to help people.

When you pray for others, do you wish for all sentient beings to know love and light? As Buddhists, we can no longer have this as our prayer. Why? When you do that, you are wishing for sentient beings to remain intact forever, revolving in a state of impermanence. This is very different from praying that the causes for suffering will be erased from their minds, that they will realize the primordial-wisdom state.

What should you as a Buddhist hope for? That when you enter into the bardo, or into your prayers, or even into the next moment, you will instantly come to know the emptiness of all phenomena, the emptiness of self-nature. Self-nature is like a puffball. You should pray to see it for what it is: poof! Just like that. You should pray with all your heart to realize the primordial, natural, pure view—the Nature which is free of all concepts, all mind-chatter. That Nature miraculously survives beneath all the garbage we pile on top of it. That Nature is pure, all pervasive, with neither beginning nor end. When you attain that view, form and formless are seen to be the same, and self is only luminosity.

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

The mistake that we make with almost any spiritual practice is waiting for it to affect us. We’re waiting for the “feeling” when Dharma is supposed to sweep us away like a Calgon bath or something, and that’s not the way it’s ever going to happen. You may have wonderful, sweeping experiences, but you’ll do that in your bathtub too. It’s just normal.

The kinds of practices that we are taught to do on the Vajrayana path, such as prostrations, are quite different and unique for us and for our culture. At first, a Westerner feels very strange performing prostrations. We feel goofy and foolish and think, “Wait a minute! I don’t even know if I like her yet. I mean, just because she’s on the big chair…” But that’s exactly why we do the prostrations, because she’s on the big chair. The big chair is there because the big chair is the throne of Dharma. It’s not my throne. It’s not Alyce Zeoli’s throne. It’s not Ahkön Lhamo’s throne. It is the throne of Dharma. When we perform the prostrations that we do, it is actually meant to be a connection between body, speech, and mind. These three are utilized together. The physical is doing something, the speech is doing something, and hopefully the mind is doing something. These three aspects of ourselves performing at the same time makes a sense of connection. It is a ritual that anchors something that is subtle, very spiritual: you can’t taste it, you can’t own it, you can’t pick it up. It anchors it into the physical. When the body performs the prostrations, you literally go into a different space. That event involving body, speech and mind takes you into a different space, if all three are engaged.

There are many mannerisms associated with Dharma, and as Westerners we think, “Well, I don’t get that whole crouching over thing. It just looks like a hunchback to me.” As Westerners, we’re taught to walk straight, almost military-like and prideful. But, actually, it is the constant mindfulness when you are in the presence of the Lama that creates an exchange of some sort. It’s not that you have to be unnatural all the time. If there is an exchange of some sort, simply that subtle tendency of doing that very little bow with mindfulness – and that’s the trick – puts the Lama’s speech in a place where you can hear it more directly. It actually establishes the connection between you and the teacher, almost like a tube or a direct tunnel going between yourself and the teacher. If you were in a room full of people and your Root Guru was talking and other people were talking and you were listening to everybody at the same time and to all in the same way, there would be no blessing there. The reason why there would be no blessing is because the main point of practicing Guru Yoga is to get us past the point of pridefulness and past the point of lack of discrimination that makes us not know whether something is extraordinary or simply ordinary. Eventually, we will come to see the non-duality of the nature of the Lama and one’s own nature. At that point one actually takes refuge in that nature, which is one’s own nature every bit as much as it is the Lama’s nature. Until then, this training is actually mind training, and, once again, Westerners have a hard time with that. We keep trying to slip it off, because we’re naturally uncomfortable with it. It doesn’t look like the rest of our culture, and we truly don’t understand.

We try to take our clues from the Lama, and this is where we all go wrong because some Lamas, like Gyaltrul Rinpoche, are funky, humble guys, and other Lamas come in like they’re your best friend. And then other Lamas come in, and they have a very fine and royal, genteel appearance. There are so many different Lamas. The trick is not to take your clue from the Lama, but to take your clue from the Dharma: from the teachings about the nature of the Lama. Whatever the appearance is, you need to form the habitual tendency and mindfulness of elevating that in preparation for the recognition of and awakening to your own Buddhanature. The reason why we’re asleep, why we’re not able to awaken, as the Buddha is awake, is primarily because the mind is so thickened through the mixture of non-virtue and virtue. It’s literally coarsened to where the loudest thing is what we hear, and the loudest thing is our ego. The loudest voice is our demand, our desire, how we feel, whether our feet hurt or not. That’s the loudest voice. The mind is simply not able to distinguish through the obscuration of being constantly involved in clinging to self-nature as inherently real. So the practice of Guru Yoga is for you, not for the teacher. Actually, I have found it to be very inconvenient. To get across the room when people are trying to prostrate is very difficult. I really do come from Brooklyn, and I really don’t care about that stuff. The only reason why I teach it the way I do, with such a fervent energy, is because I know how it works, and I know the power of that kind of practice.

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