Compassion

The Path to Accountability: A Dialogue on Recovery

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Jetsunma: Student 1, if you can’t do the program, you will remain seriously mentally ill. The consequence is your mind will continue to get worse and worse and you will end up losing your job, possibly not too far from now. You have to face the fact that you are mentally disabled, severely mentally ill, it ain’t pretty and we all watch it. I know you won’t listen to me, you never do. Do you want me to find a man to say this to you? Because that’s easy. Anyone with eyes can say that to you. You have to get a hold of your mind! Or your old age won’t be pretty.

Student 1: I understand Rinpoche. I am renewing my commitment to ACA going to a meeting tonight and planning to do a meeting a day for at least 30 days. I will continue with “A New Hope” and can start “The Loving Parent Guidebook”… or any method you think is appropriate. Other things that helped me before were consistency in daily Ngondro practice, making sure I eat (heartily) on time, going to bed on time, staying off social media. Not being involved with any activity outside of KPC for a while, as Student 2 told me you instructed.

Jetsunma: The truth is you will not do any of the things you’re promising to do. You’re just talking talking talking with no mind or heart behind any of it. You are not going to do the program, you’re not doing it well, you won’t accomplish anything. Keep listening to your parents. Look what that’s done for you. You’re leaving for sure. It’s just a matter of time.

Student 2: Student 1, do you realize that you did not commit to doing the program until you were firm in your recovery? You’re creating a box to check, rather than embracing the transformation that is being asked of you. You use all the business as an excuse to not really confront your real problems.

Student 1: There is something going on with Raja. Multiple times today when I’ve checked on them, he has been near the top of the water opening and closing his mouth. It could possibly be a sign of gill flukes.

Jetsunma: Sounds like you’re freaking out and trying to make yourself useful. Use that energy to heal yourself. Student 1 you are sick, and you are getting sicker. I know your whole family is like that so you can’t see it. But you have to get a hold of your mind. You so desperately desperately need attention you’ll do what ever it takes, even if it is for us to criticize you. Your poor sick hungry ghost. Pull yourself together or leave.

Student 1: I’m very sorry Rinpoche. I definitely see the sickness and the relapse. I know I’m not coming from the heart. I do see more of my patterns in this. I realize I have continued to do harm in the process and have lost ground in recovery. I have a lot of regret and I am very sorry to you all, to all the fish, and all other sentient beings who have hopes of us. I know you have no reason to trust me but I will keep trying.

Jetsunma: I wish you would tell me that you could defend yourself from this sickness, that you will be stalwart and fight it. But the pull of your family is so strong, I really wish you could get to a place where you were not asking them for help. I wish you were committed to a course like that, rather than just spinning. An all embracing plan where you can abandon the sick way of living you have. That’s what I wish you would tell me. Why? Because I care about you. You’re pushing it pretty thin, but I care about you.

Student 1: I wish that I could tell you that too Rinpoche, and I hope to tell you that in the future, hopefully sooner rather than later. I think that’s actually what my mental and emotional relapse is about, holding that separation in my mind and then regressing because I’m afraid. I would also like to see myself communicating with you more honestly, openly, and from the heart.

Jetsunma: You know you can’t get to your heart until you let your parents go. Your father really. Your father has control of you still. I’m sorry your mother was such a numbnuts.
Thank you Student 1, that’s the first real thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth in a long time. Student 1, will you now feed them twice a day as I asked you to do. You can see how hungry they are.

To a Student

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Student, you may think that you’re depressed, but no you’re not. You’re reacting to a situation that actually happened. And that’s normal. What are you suppose to do with it? You’re suppose to act intelligently and repair whatever is wrong. Work the program, look inside, and find out what is happening. It’s not blanket depression. I can see that. You are reacting to events, which is normal, but you’ve never actually done it openly before. You just acted out. With the program you can learn to feel without being destructive to yourself. You fold when anything happens. And that’s not the way to live. Examine the situation, and act accordingly.

Student:

Thank you, Rinpoche. 

Commentary on the Bodhisattva Vow: HH Penor Rinpoche – Our Kind Parents

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mother and child

The following is adapted from an oral commentary given by His Holiness in conjunction with a ceremony wherein he bestowed the bodhisattva vow upon a gathering of disciples at Namdroling in Bozeman, Montana, November 1999:

[The second way to adjust one’s intention in order to be in harmony with the special feature of this instruction is through] developing attraction to enlightenment. According to this tradition, what leads one to develop an attraction to enlightenment is the cultivation of love for all beings, which begins by contemplating the suffering of cyclic existence and then cultivating repulsion and weariness [toward that existence].

Think about all living beings that at some time or another, throughout the course of innumerable past lifetimes, have been your own kind father or mother. Consider how a mother will anything for her child–even give her own life, without hesitation. Consider how all living beings have been that kind to you at some time in the past–not just once, but countless times, in countless different circumstances and situations over the course of countless lifetimes since beginningless time. Consider also that to not think carefully about repaying this kindness, and thereby to go through your life without the intention to truly benefit parent sentient beings, and so to actually ignore them, is truly shameless.

Many people in the West may think, “Wait a minute! My parents were not very kind to me. In fact, we are not even close, and I don’t even like them, so why should I feel that I need to repay their kindness now?” If that is what you think, then take a moment to think about how you acquired your body. Is it not due to the kindness of your parents that you have your precious human body? From the time your consciousness entered the union of your father’s seed and your mother’s egg, your mother carried you in her own body. Her body nurtured you as you grew within it. Then with pain and difficulty she gave birth to you. Her kindness did not just stop there: for many years she cared for you and lovingly fed, cleaned, clothed, and wiped you; she provided shelter and cared for you when you were sick, and thus she protected you and looked out for you constantly. If you think you don’t need to repay the kindness of your parents, just remind yourself of those events, which you were the recipient of time and time again.

If that still does not change your attitude, so that you still do not understand the kindness your parents showed you, then think about your body, the gift of your body, which is who you are; your parents gave you that. Because your parents showed you the great kindness of giving you your body, your precious life, here you are. Sure you had the causes for your precious human rebirth, but without parents you wouldn’t have your body. And if you didn’t have your body, you wouldn’t be able to receive these vows.

In our present state of ignorance, we have an inability to recognize that all beings have been our parents in the past, and we certainly don’t know what the particular situations and circumstances of those lifetimes were. Nonetheless, it is certain that we have had countless sentient beings as our parents over and over again in countless past lives. The truth is, at the present time we just do not recognize that.

Imagine you are on the bank of a river with your mother and suddenly she falls in and is being carried away by the rushing water. There you stand on the bank, watching that happen. What would you do? Would you do something to try to save her, such as throw out a rope? Or would your turn your back and walk away rather than risk your own life? Would you be concerned for her, or would your concern be only for yourself? The intention of hearers and solitary realizers can be likened to the later case, while the intention of Mahayana practitioners can be likened to the former. While it is important to develop attraction toward peace, you should never, for any reason, be attracted to the quiescence of the hearers and solitary realizers.

Limitless Kindness

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

One of the most important and central thoughts in Buddhist philosophy is the idea of compassion. The Buddha taught that we must cultivate our lives as a vehicle to be of benefit to all sentient beings.  It’s good that you’re a good mother, and it’s good that you’re a good friend, but we can’t limit ourselves to a small, familiar circle. We have to go on and on increasing our compassionate activity, our influence and our determination until we attain a level of kindness or compassion that supersedes what we believe is reasonable. We can’t stop even with our nation. We can’t think that we only want to help Americans. Nor can we stop with our world. We can’t think that we only want to help humans and animals, which are the ones that we can see. We have to think, according to the Buddha, that we wish to be of benefit to all sentient beings.

A sentient being is one who has sensory feeling or the development of that kind of discriminating consciousness. According to the Buddha’s teachings, there are six realms of cyclic existence, and there are sentient beings in all of these realms. The human realm and the animal realm are visible to us. This is living proof that at least some of the Buddha’s teaching is right. We see human beings and we see animals; therefore, we know that they exist. But according to the Buddha’s teaching, there are also non-physical beings and different kinds of beings that must be considered if we are to truly develop the mind of compassion.

Limiting ourselves to an identity such as,”I am a woman,” or “I am a man,” or “I am an American,” or “I am a Russian,” or even “I am a citizen of planet earth,” is not the way of the Buddha. Instead, we should think that on every particle we can see, and all those that we cannot see, and in every inch of space, there are millions and millions of sentient beings. And space goes on forever. If we intend to develop the mind of kindness, it must extend to all sentient beings equal to the limits of space.  Space has no limits and there are limitless beings, seen and unseen.  Therefore, we must extend the mind of compassion to beings far beyond those we can conceive of with our brains. That is an awesome thought. How can we really do that? We think that must be impossible. How can we be directly concerned with somebody we can’t see? How can we really care about something that might be infinitesimally small, like bacteria? Or a sentient being that may be as large as a galaxy? How can we seriously consider we must be kind to all sentient beings in that way?

When you develop the mind of compassion, you have to be careful how you develop that mind. If you examine yourself profoundly and honestly – and you have to be willing to be very honest with yourself – you may find that your goal is not really to benefit all sentient beings, but to be a kind person. There are worlds and universes of difference between these two goals. One is selfless: you truly wish to be of benefit to all sentient beings. The other is heading in the right direction, but ultimately it is not selfless because you wish that you could be a kind person. I hope that you can hear the difference between these two ideas. There are worlds of difference between them.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Mind of Compassion

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

What is it about compassion that is so important?  Why do you hear so much about it in the Buddha’s teaching?  From the Mahayana point of view there are two different kinds of compassion, or Bodhicitta. Bodhicitta actually means mind of enlightenment. The mind of compassion – the fully functional, fully awakened mind of compassion – is the same, and not different from, the mind of enlightenment.  You cannot achieve enlightenment without developing the mind of compassion.  You cannot achieve compassion – true compassion, selfless compassion – without moving ever closer to the mind of enlightenment.  Essentially they are the same.

In our language we have two different words for fully awakened compassion and enlightenment, but from the Buddhist perspective when you say Bodhicitta you mean compassion and you also mean enlightenment.  Due to the structure of our language, we actually separate the two.  Yet they cannot be separated.  Compassion and enlightenment can never be separated.  It’s impossible.  The reason why we seek to express the mind of compassion, and why we emphasize it, is to accomplish our own purpose and the purpose of others.  We want to achieve enlightenment.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The Practice of Loving

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

Compassion is a subject that should be of interest to everyone.  There isn’t one person that should consider themselves exempt from the practice of loving.  We know from our own lives, I’m sure, that the times we have been the happiest are the times that we have loved.  And the times that we have been the most useful are the times that we have been loving.

Compassion is one of the foundational teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, but it is more extensive than the kind of loving we find in our lives. From the Mahayana view, we should seek to love all sentient beings equally.  It is a very interesting point of view, because you would think it more natural to love your husband or your wife, your parents and your children, more than you would love others. Buddhists are taught to honor our parents and to maintain the integrity of family, to not have divorces and go from family to family.  Yet the Buddhist perspective is that all sentient beings are essentially equal, that their needs are equal and that all sentient beings equally desire happiness.  It is useful and beneficial to love everyone and to experience compassion for all beings equally.

We are taught the very reason we love certain people more than others is because in our minds we have the karma of attachment and aversion.  We have hope and fear within our minds, and these things are based on the belief in our own ego structure, the belief that self-nature is inherently real.  Our relationships with others are shadowed by that and take on the flavor of whatever particular energy suits our particular ego.  Because of our ego, we think that we love one person more than we love another.

If we existed somehow miraculously in an egoless state, we would find that all sentient beings are equal and the same nature.  They are that same primordial, natural suchness. Seeing each sentient being as that would help us understand that there is essentially no difference. We are all exactly the same, we all desire happiness and haven’t yet developed the skills to get that happiness.  We are all deserving of love and caring and nurturing and being taught the skills of happiness.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Extraordinary Blessings

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

We need to practice human kindness. For instance if  someone described to me child abuse and they said to me, “As a Buddhist you believe in karma, do you just accept that this is the child’s karma to have experienced abuse and do you sort of leave it at that and think, well that is their karma and pray for them?” Well, Lord Buddha, I don’t know what you would say if you were here right now, standing here in the flesh, but I’ll tell you what I understand to be the Buddha’s perspective. If you see someone being abused or hurt and you do nothing to end their suffering that is now your karma.  You will have karma with them and you always will until you can be of benefit to them.  So ordinary human kindness is very much a part of what we have to do, but it isn’t all that we do.

We have to prevent people from being hurt; we have to feed the hungry if we can.  If we see suffering we have to do what we can to end it. But it is simply not useful to stop there. We must continue with an extraordinary kind of love, an extraordinary kind of compassion that sees beyond the causes and effects that are only obvious in this life time and goes further to understand the root cause and the ultimate effect.  We must develop the capacity to completely liberate ourselves from the cause and effect relationships that have been caused from the beginningless past and that are with us always until we reach enlightenment.  We have to think not only of this one slice of reality that is our life, what is it – eighty years? We have to think of the countless eons of cyclic existence that we have continued to accumulate cause and effect relationships and we must institute causes that overcome all of them.  You have to get some perspective.  To practice Dharma sincerely you have to get some perspective.  It isn’t just about eighty years.  It is about a long time.  You may not always understand the causes that you experience the results of now.

It is popular now for people to go to psychics and say, “How come my husband always beats me?”  And the psychic says, “Oh, because in a past life you ran over him with a mule.”  Well, fine so far as that goes, that may very well be one of the things that happened. Maybe you were the mule and this psychic doesn’t like that, but anyway, that, I promise you, is only one of many things that contribute to your life such as it is now.  It is only one of many things and it is impossible for a psychic without complete omniscience to see all of them.  You may never know what the root causes are. But what is wonderful about the Buddha’s path is that you don’t have to know what the root causes are: they are all desire, hatred, greed and ignorance. This is the medicine.

Here in the West we love to examine our garbage before we take it out, but you don’t have to do that, you just take it out. This is the necessary perspective to maintain: that the wisdom we must seek is the wisdom that is different from ordinary knowledge, it is the pristine balance of the primordial wisdom state.  It is completely in union with love.  And that union is the very display, or results in the very display, of what we see bringing the most benefit in this world.  When we look in this world and see where there is hope and where there is relief, we find that there is an extraordinary path, that there is an extraordinary means to achieve realization. That there have been, and there are, in this world extraordinary teachers incarnating again and again, and there are extraordinary blessings. We are living in an extraordinary time, able to grasp an extraordinary opportunity.  This being the case we should adopt this wisdom as our most precious goal and adopt this love as our most precious mother.

Leaving you with that thought, I hope in some way you will come to the point where you will choose with certainty and with courage and with determination to practice in a consistent and meaningful way. I hope with all my heart you do not waste this precious opportunity.  It is taught this opportunity to hear the Buddha’s words and see the Buddha’s form and come to a point where we can accomplish the Buddha’s teaching is so rare it is like finding a precious jewel sifting through garbage.  It is that rare. And having had this opportunity once, if we do not institute the causes by which we will have it again and again and again it will be a long time before we see it again.  Those are the teachings.  I didn’t make that up and I believe them.  So I ask you to consider practice, to learn how to practice, to practice consistently and to be faithful in your practice and, most of all, to begin now, even on your own, to turn your mind with thoughts of caring for others.  To cultivate both ordinary and extraordinary kindness, to cultivate a pure determination to bring about the end of suffering, these things you can begin now.  Thank you.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Ultimate Compassion

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

Ordinary sentient beings cannot bring about extraordinary ends.  Ordinary sentient beings do not have the skill to bring about the end of suffering, since they themselves have within their mindstreams the causes of suffering.  Who then will act as this guide?  Who then will bring this path?  Who then will offer these teachings?  Who will announce a door to liberation?  It must be our intention as we practice this path until we reach supreme enlightenment, and once having accomplished realization, that we will remain in such a form as a Bodhisattva and return again and again and again in order to benefit beings. This is ultimate compassion.  This is the compassion that is actually quite different from ordinary human kindness.

Let’s take as an example a relationship with a teacher.  Let’s say that you have found a teacher who has those qualities, who has attained some realization and returns again and again to benefit beings.  We might think of human kindness in a certain way.  For instance let’s say that I have a student over here and he is a little slow.  He is a nice person, he is trying to accomplish Dharma, but he is a little slow.  Well if you examine it, that slowness is the result of laziness.  He is a little lazy.  Maybe he doesn’t have all the compassion he needs to really be fervent on this path.  Maybe he really needs to develop that compassion and maybe he is just getting a little slothful and maybe there are some things that the teacher can see that are not quite kosher, not quite right with him.  But because we are ordinary we might think, well maybe he is just a little slow and he can’t help it, he is doing the best he can. He is a nice guy, just leave him alone.  He is a little slow.  We might think maybe we will just be kind to him and we will try to support him to see if we can help him. Then we will just be nice to him and little by little he will do the best he can in his feeble, little way.

So he continues and he is still kind of slow and feeble and pitiful.  Then one day a good teacher comes along, sizes up the situation and really displays some wrathful activity and says, “You are going to straighten up your act.”  Gives him ‘what for,’ tells him the truth, reads him the riot act, testifies before Buddha and just changes his whole life around.  Causes him a great deal of upset, causes him to have serious gastric disturbances, causes him to whimper and cry a little bit and the rest of us might think, poor guy, boy did he ever get it.  Wow, that is really rough, that is really terrible.

The difference is that this teacher might have had the capacity to understand what is really happening is that an obstacle to his practice is arising.  It isn’t about being simple at all, it’s about an obstacle to his practice arising, and that obstacle has to do with past habits of sloth and laziness.  It has to do with not having been helpful to other sentient beings; it has to do with his not sending his mother a card on Mother’s day for a couple of years. We couldn’t see what the Lama could see and the Lama knew, but the Lama had that kind of wisdom. Well, what happened to this poor old guy is that he got really shook up, he got finished with his serious gastric disturbances, he took him pepto bismal and he is all squared away. Now suddenly he has changed.

How has he changed?  Has he changed because he really needed to be yelled at?  No because you could have done that.  What the Lama did was to cut out an obstacle and that is kind of miraculous activity because there was awareness there, there was a skillful means that ordinary sentient beings don’t have.  There was also a pure motivation.  That Lama wasn’t really interested in yelling at this poor guy, but he saw there was an obstacle close to the surface and if it were cut out in some profound way it would be pretty clear sailing after that.  That is also possible.  I don’t know if there is such a Lama or such a situation, I don’t know if any of these things are true, but I do know what I am describing is the difference between ordinary perception and extraordinary perception, the difference between ordinary human kindness and true compassion.

Human beings want to follow human rules; we want to be kind in the ways we are taught.  We think that is the answer because we don’t understand cause and effect.  We don’t understand that in order to change the effect we are seeing now you cannot simply mess around with the effect some more.  You have to remove the causes. If you have that pristine awareness, if you have that awakening, if you have that quality of knowing that comes with that kind of realization, you might be able to see the causes.  Through skillful means, with pure enlightened intention through the perfect stability of the union of wisdom with pure compassion in your mind, you might be able to bring about the causes to end the particular suffering he is experiencing. So maybe the man turns around and maybe it’s not because of the reasons that you think.

Our job is to develop these extraordinary skills, and although I think in my case it is going to take an awful long time, still I think we have to do our best to understand that what is needed to accomplish the end of suffering are not ordinary techniques.  They must come from the mind of enlightenment, they must lead to the mind of enlightenment, they must exhibit the qualities of the mind of enlightenment and they may not be exactly sympathetic to some of the human beliefs we may hold true.  We have to accept that this may be a challenge for Westerners.  Ordinary human kindness cannot be discounted.  It is a part of what we must do.  Actually ordinary human kindness is included in the miraculous compassion I just described, as not only did the Lama have the skill to know what was wrong with this fellow, not only did he have the ultimate compassion to care deeply that he accomplish his practice and achieve supreme enlightenment, but he also had ordinary human kindness. He cared about the guy and wanted him to be happy.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

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