happiness

What Are You Gathering?

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The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “The Bodhisattva Ideal”

In the view of the Bodhisattva, we realize that everything in life is impermanent, that nothing we can gather has any meaning other than the collection of virtuous habitual tendencies within our mindstream. Having realized that, one travels a moderate path in which one’s own enlightenment and the enlightenment of others become the same weight, and nondual.

Further, we come to understand that we are one and others are many. Even in this room, let’s say, if I am practicing as a Bodhisattva, I think that yes, my happiness is equal to the happiness of any one of you. But there are so many more of you than there are of me that it only makes sense for me to do what is beneficial for you rather than what is beneficial for me.  This I try my best to live by. As a Bodhisattva, I consider this to be the most precious understanding that I have.  It’s my treasure and my wealth. It’s reasonable and logical that the needs of the many would outweigh the needs of the one.   Because we are the same, and because we all wish to be happy, and because in our nature we are absolutely inseparable and indistinguishable from one another, I find that I cannot be happy without you. So all of the different gatherings and collections that one can make during the course of one’s lifetime have to be understood in that way.  Are they really worth anything?  Or are they the gaudy childlike baubles that we play with until we have a better understanding of what the Buddha has taught.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

The Big Picture

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An excerpt from a teaching called True Motivation for Kindness by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The Buddha teaches us that everything a sentient being does has a little hook on the end of it. And the hook is: I…me…always about me. So you have to watch when you’re being kind that you’re not being kind just to be a certain way. What you really want to do is to alleviate the suffering of sentient beings. It’s about them, not about you. Get the big picture. All sentient beings are suffering. Get that they, like you, don’t wish to suffer.

You can help others understand the value of kindness. You can demonstrate it. You can begin to show people the value of being of benefit to others. You can help people to understand in some simple way that there is something better than the superficiality that they are revolving in. You can pray for their enlightenment. Make prayers for the end of hunger, prayers for the end of war, prayers for the end of suffering in all its forms. You can do that, and in doing that, you have actually entered onto the Path. It’s just a baby step, but a good one. It is one thing that you can do quietly in your heart. No one ever sees it. You can do it without expecting anyone to pay you back.

The upshot of all of this then is to consider compassion in a new way, in a sense to consider it in an ordinary way, in that you can truly practice it within the context of your life. But more than that, know yourself! See what your motivation is. On this path your motivation is everything. Examine the faults of cyclic existence so that when you accept the hard work of this path, even if it’s just simply acting in a compassionate way, accomplish it for the right reasons.

Take into yourself the fundamental truth that cyclic existence is faulted, but that the Buddha said there is an end to suffering, and it is attainable to you if you open your eyes and act appropriately. Don’t waste your time gathering unto yourself things that you cannot take with you. Don’t waste your time. Practice the Path.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Many are More Precious than One

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A Teaching from Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Three thousand years ago Lord Buddha introduced the idea of great compassion to an unknowing world. After his enlightenment he was asked to teach others the means to supreme realization. Although he was tempted to simply leave — knowing that almost no one would be interested in his teachings, and of those who were, few would try to follow them and fewer still would succeed — he nonetheless replied, “For those few, I will remain.”

Buddha is the exceptional teacher who teaches the development of great and selfless compassion as part of the technology of the path to enlightenment. But to develop such great love, it is first necessary to familiarize oneself with the nature of suffering and especially with its causes. Amidst the array of spiritual teachings, this perspective is unique because most people do not understand the reasons for suffering or how suffering appears in the world.

The Buddha taught us that human happiness through ownership, eating, drinking, gaining love, stature, approval, or even the happiness of engaging in pleasurable activities is at best temporary. These experiences do not prevent suffering because between these happy times we can experience times of distress.

Nor do happy times solve questions concerning the nature of suffering and why it arises. The Buddha taught that the happiness of enlightenment is not composed of impermanent things but occurs when one cuts out the sources of all unhappiness. Through understanding and meditation, one liberates the mind into true awareness, a state free of conditions and defilements. This pure awareness is a lasting state.

Ultimately, the attitude of care-taking or being responsible for the wellbeing of others, of caring for planet earth, its inhabitants and all the 3,000 myriads of universes described in Buddhist cosmology  is the true cause for ultimate and permanent happiness. Being responsible for all sentient beings is a spiritual technology the Buddha taught to be the supreme antidote to selfishness, compulsive desire, self absorption and all other symptoms of the ego.

When we remain selfish and neurotically fixated in the ego, we remain deeply unhappy. When we are in a state of profound generosity, having a relaxed mental attitude and pure motivation, we remain stable in a state of joy. Yet if we view caring for others only as a medicine, we may miss the beauty of it.

No sentient being is born with pure, unconditional, constant love. In the beginning, selflessness and generosity require discipline. Like all things, they must arise from a cause. One must break old habitual tendencies, and this requires discipline. Initially, one must understand the values of generosity and the pitfalls of selfishness. One cannot then rely on one’s feelings, because they are products of an ego distorted by the self-centered habits that produce unhappiness and disregard for others. It is necessary to understand the cause and effect relationship here.

Happiness does not just appear. Enlightenment does not just appear. Neither do unhappiness or suffering just appear. When one understands this apparently simple truth, it is possible to make generosity part of one’s activity in a true and lasting way, because one has a basis of understanding that will support and uphold the discipline necessary in the initial stages.

Ultimately, through persistence one can soar. There is a point at which a great leap takes place and one moves into an experience of effortlessness. This is because ultimately, in the pure state, compassion is part of one’s nature. We each, in fact, live in a world of our own making and have the choice of living selfishly, trying in a futile way to get happiness through gaining or having more phenomena (whether external or internal)  or we can live a life of generosity and responsibility, cognizant that there are many more sentient beings than just our selves.

Because their value is equal, many pieces of gold are worth more than a single coin. So it is with sentient beings. Many are more precious than one. Fortified with that awareness, one can live and act accordingly with simplicity, generosity and respect for life. The attitude of cherishing all sentient beings as though they were truly the same as you is a deeply moving and personal experience. It is a life changer. It is also the cause of happiness.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Creating Happiness

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An excerpt from a teaching called How Buddhism Differs from Other Religions by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

If all we want is happiness, how do we do it?  It’s a little, but there’s a real trick to it, but you can create happiness.  Here’s how it’s done.  First of all, all sentient beings are equal.   And in our nature, we are not only the same, we are one.  From the point of view of Buddhahood, if the Buddha were to look out at everyone, and look from the mind of awakening, in the state of enlightenment, it would not be possible to see where one of us ends, and the other begins, because our true nature is pure, pristine, primordial light.  It’s not visible light in the way that we understand light, because when you see light then you are standing away from it.  You would call it undifferentiated, nonconceptual illumination – radiance.  That is our nature.  So when we defile that nature in our relationships with others, and cause harm to others, we suffer.  If we could do the opposite, and try to benefit others, we would create happiness.

It doesn’t seem to be the truth because we think, “Gimme, gimme, gimme.”  This is what America has taught us.  This is what our culture says to us.  “Gimme a car.  I’ll be happy.  Give me a boyfriend, I’ll be happy.  Give me another boyfriend, I’ll be twice as happy.”  That’s what we’re taught. We’re taught that gimme, gimme, gimme is the way to happiness.  It’s kind of the modern mantra, isn’t it?  “Gimme, gimme, gimme hung.”  We try very hard, and it doesn’t work that way.

What we find out is that in our oneness, we must uphold one another.   We must not only practice kindness towards one another, but practice recognition.  So, let’s say in my desire to be happy, I decide the only thing that’s going to work for me is a new car.  In my materialistic American psyche that’s what I’ve decided.  I saw this new car on TV, and I’ve got to have it.   Whatever I do to get money for that car, even if it’s honest, even if I go to my credit union, and borrow, make my payments,  and I do everything right, it’s ordinary.  It’s just regular.  It’s the stuff that you move around when you move an apple from here to there.  It’s nothing but ordinary, worldly gobbledygook.

So you go to your credit union, and you get the dollars, and you get the car, and then what happens?  You’re happy for a little while, and then the car gets old.  The baby throws up in it.   The dog shits in it.  You spill milk in it.  You drive it, and it gets old, or you smash it up.  Or now that you’ve bought it and gone to the credit union and cleaned all your money out, you don’t have money for gas!  This is not the way to create happiness.  Even though the car might cheer you up for a little while, it is not going to change your life.  It is not going to do what you hope it’s going to do.  And it’s the same with the big ticket items – the house.  And the non-buyable items like relationships, and marriages, and boyfriends, and girlfriends and all that stuff.  All are like band aids in samsara – quick fixes.  When you’re unhappy and you grab for something like that, your intuition tells you you’re going to feel better, but the real solution is counterintuitive.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Ordinary or Extraordinary?

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An excerpt from a teaching called How Buddhism Differs from Other Religions by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

In the Buddha Dharma there are mainly two kinds of compassion.   There is ordinary compassion, and there is extraordinary or sublime compassion, also called ordinary bodhicitta or sublime bodhicitta.   Bodhicitta is the great display of compassion, which is our own primordial nature.   Ordinary bodhicitta is the caring for others through the means that we can find on this earth.  In other words, caring for others through ordinary means.  Like for instance, if you see somebody that’s hungry and you give them a sandwich.  That’s compassionate, but it’s ordinary compassion because you know you didn’t get the sandwich from the sublime realms.  You got it from a kitchen or you bought it somewhere.  It’s ordinary stuff that went into it – baloney or salami or peanut butter and jelly. It’s ordinary even if you make 150 sandwiches and you pass them out to the hungry homeless.  That’s a real good day, but still ordinary compassion because it’s easily attainable.

There are many hungry people now in Burma.  No matter what the junta says, the people are not eating, and they are sick and dying.  Let’s say somehow we magically can put together everything they need, and just bust through the blockades and give it to the people.  Let’s say we airdrop everything they need, and the whole place is satisfied. The people have tents or homes or something to live in.  They have the means to get food.  They have food.  They have bedding; they have everything because of this magnificent airdrop that you made.  Let’s say that’s possible.  That would take an awful lot of money, but still in all it’s ordinary human compassion.  We never see ordinary humans doing that very much, and that goes to show you the pickle we’re in.  But it’s still ordinary human compassion.

Now, what is supreme or extraordinary compassion?  That is compassionate activity that concerns and offers that which is not of this world.  The great bodhisattvas that return again and again are considered to demonstrate the great bodhicitta, because the nature of the bodhisattva is such that once they attain certain bhumis, which are levels of realization, then at that time they can step into enlightenment or step into nirvana and attain the rainbow body at any moment.  But they hold back because they wish to benefit sentient beings.  They look at the suffering of sentient beings.  They see this terrible suffering and it moves them, and they return to earth to show them the way out of that suffering.  That is considered extraordinary compassion.  So then translating, teaching, creating the books of Dharma, offering these ancient teachings in a modern world so that modern people can continue to benefit from something that would ordinarily be lost to them, that is considered extraordinary compassion.

When I held my little new born son in my arms, I thought, “I would do anything for you.  I will care for you. I will keep you warm.  I will give you my milk, and when you’re done with that, I will bake pies.  I’ll do anything for you.”  And then I realized I was lying to him, because if my son were to get gravely ill, I would have no power to help him.  Or if my son were to die, even though I told him I would never abandon him, I would not be able to follow him into the next rebirth.  I would not be able to see to his welfare.  So, there’s my baby in my arms, and I have lied to him.

That was one of the main things that made me practice really hard when I was young.  I made it my business to learn how to provide the Phowa, which is the transference of consciousness from one level to the next, or from one life to the next rebirth.  I made myself learn to do that so that I could help people, and dogs, and cats, and anybody in the dying process, and so I could even follow my own child into the next life, and make sure that his rebirth is good.  I’ve attained that goal.  And I’m very happy for it.  Do you see the difference there?  A mother’s love is so powerful, so extraordinary.  You would feed your child your own body if they were hungry.   And you look in the eyes of your child and you think, “Never has there been love like this.  I would do anything for you.”  But until that compassion applies to all sentient beings, and we have the skills through our own realization, we are lying.   And we are not able to do very much for those we love.  That is the one of the differences between ordinary and supreme bodhicitta.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

What We All Want

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An excerpt from a teaching called How Buddhism Differs from Other Religions by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

When we study Buddhism, the first thing we come to understand is the equality of all that lives.  This is a direct teaching from none other than Shakyamuni Buddha himself.  He taught that all beings are essentially equal in their nature and that they all have the same exact desires that we have.  We want to be happy.  We strive for happiness in our own way everyday.  We go here and go there to be happy.  We rest to be happy.  We wake up to be happy.  We have our weekends to be happy.  We hope the weekdays will be happy.  It’s something that’s a theme in us and whether we consciously realize that we are striving for happiness or not, it is an underlying fuel that runs the machine.  And when we are not happy, we are filled with desire.  And when we are not happy, we are suffering.

The Buddha taught us that each and every sentient being – humans, animals, and even nonphysical beings mainly wish to be happy in the simple way that we do.  I watch MSNBC news sometimes, and I watch Chris Matthews and Keith Oberman. And Chris Matthews always says in one of his commercials, “This is something uniquely American.  This is something that really shows us who we are.”  We are Americans, because in America there is the hope that this day is going to be the best day.  And that this is going to be our favorite day, and that we are going to be really happy today.  And so we wake up in America with that hope because we have the freedom to gain that happiness.  We’re not oppressed or starving or homeless or something where there is no real potential for true happiness, comfort, or ease.  I disagree with Chris Matthews even though I am a fan.  I don’t think that only in America do we wake up with that thought.  Maybe in America it seems more attainable.  But the truth of the matter is, no matter where we are, what diseases we suffer from, what poverty or hunger or disability we endure, or what oppression or warlike conditions, every single person has the wish for the freedom to be happy, and wishes for happiness.

When we realize that all sentient beings are exactly the same in that way, an understanding comes up in our minds.  It is a sense of the equality of all that lives.  Perhaps it is a sense of budding compassion or understanding.  That’s the goal anyway.

So, how does that work?  Sometimes we hear about really terrible situations, and really terrible people, such as a serial killer who has murdered like Jeffrey Dahmer.  Have you ever heard about him?  He was a serial killer that used to cannibalize people, and live with their dead bodies, and stuff like that.  Now, of course our understanding of that is that the man was extremely sick.  We can understand that, but do we understand that as strange and abhorrent and bizarre, and as ghastly his behavior was, he was striving to be happy?   But the confusion, the delusion in his mind was so thick, that in order to be happy, he had to completely dominate another life form.   Yet underlying that, even while killing, maiming and torturing people, he was striving to be happy.  That’s a bizarre thought, but it helps us to understand a little bit about the nature of suffering sentient beings.

Then we think about animals.  For those of you that don’t know, I just adore animals.  I feel very close to them, and I have a bunch.  They are my family.   Animals suffer too, and I have come to understand through my own experience, not just from the teachings, that animals also strive every day to be happy.  I see my dogs move from a hot place to a cool place, from a cool place to a warm place, and it’s about wanting to feel comfortable, to be happy.  Whenever you buy them a new toy or a new treat, they are gung-ho on it because they want to be happy.  I’ve seen for myself that desire for happiness in humans and in animals.  And so I absolutely and totally understand that what the Buddha has said is true.  While we are striving to be happy, we have absolutely no understanding as to how to go about it.  And therein lies the rub, as they say.   Therein lies the problem.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Changing Habits

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An excerpt from a teaching called How Buddhism Differs from Other Religions by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Many people have gone to teachers and said, “What was I in my past life?   What kind of being am I?” thinking that they are different somehow and that this is important.  It’s really not the case.  We are all exactly the same.  But a lot of times the people will go to the teacher and ask questions like that.  Buddha Shakyamuni’s answer was, “If you want to know who you were in your past life, look in the mirror.”  Not necessarily at your physical appearance, and how your mascara is and that sort of thing.  Look at who you are.  Look at your life.   Look at what you’ve accomplished.  Not what you’re spinning in your head that you’re going to accomplish, but what you have accomplished.  Then you can begin a certain analysis.

Let’s say that you are chronically poor.  You tend to work wage jobs, and can’t get the big jobs, and just can’t make the money thing work.  It’s a chronic condition.    Most people think that the best thing to do is to go looking for the fabulous job or meet the fabulous man with the big money or something like that so you can get rich.  That kind of thinking will keep you in exactly the same position you’ve always been in, and it will never change.

If you find yourself in a state of chronic poverty, you must understand that cause and effect relationships are operating here.   You are now reaping the result of a cause that was created maybe early in this lifetime, more likely in another lifetime.  This is why it’s so hard, because you can’t see it.   We don’t know what happened in our last life or ten lifetimes ago.  We really don’t know what the cause is.

Again the Buddha says that this is where analysis is very useful.   So, we look and we say, “Well, I’ve always been poor.  It’s always been an issue.   So, what can I do to solve this problem?”  Is hoping for a rich person or a rich job to come along really the solution?  Actually, not.  What you should start doing if you are chronically poor, is to give all you can to the poor.  The shirt off your back if you have to.  Now, people will try that and they’ll come back to me and say it didn’t work.   How long did you try it?   It took you lifetimes to get this habitual.   You’ve got to work at it awhile.  You can’t expect to just be kind for a couple of weeks, and then boom!  We’re home and dry.   It’s not like that.  You have to actually take the grasping energy that you’re feeling, “I want the money.  I want the money.  I want the money.”  And turn it around into “I give what I can give.”  If it’s a quarter, if it’s twenty cents, if it’s a penny, if it’s a hug, if it’s some extra clothes to people who don’t have clothes, or a warm blanket in the wintertime.  Anything.  It doesn’t have to be big bucks, but you develop the habit of generosity to the degree that it outweighs that graspiness that says, “When am I gonna get rich?  When am I gonna get rich?  When am I gonna get rich?”  By the time you’ve changed that habit, things are changing in your life.  But until you change the habit, nothing will change.  It’s all about our habitual tendencies.  There is nobody that knows this better than a recovering alcoholic.

I think recovering alcoholics make the best students, because they understand what habitual tendency is all about.  And they understand what addiction is all about too, including the addiction to “gimme, gimme, gimme.  I want it.  I want it.  I want it.  More, more, more.”   That’s an addiction.

We begin to break our habitual tendencies and turn them around, and we change the addiction.  At that point, we begin giving.  When you start giving to others, generally, you give to people who have less than you.   And one of the first things it does is make you realize how much you actually have.   Because we don’t generally realize how much we actually have.  Impoverishment is in here.  So, when we begin to act kindly and generously towards others and give what little we have, the grasping hand turns around and becomes a giving hand.   The mind relaxes about the issue of having.  And that clears the way for the ripening of virtuous karma.  Virtuous karma will bring us happiness, joy, money, whatever it’s tuned into.  Whatever it is the result of.  But it’s the graspy neediness that keeps us from giving and makes us so unhappy.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Spiritual Technology

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

You are at the beginning. You have arrived at the door to liberation. You are knocking on a door that opens to the end of suffering. You have a tremendous capacity here, and in order to utilize that capacity you have to begin to utilize the technology being offered you. That technology is very simple: you have to soften and turn your mind. Whether you are a Buddhist or not, in order to achieve any realization at all – in fact in order to continue in a steadfast way on a path without being pulled away by the craziness of your own mind – you have to develop stability. That stability has to be based on the softening and gentling of your mind. You have to free it as much as possible from discursive thought, and from the conceptualization associated with the belief in self-nature as being real. You have to free it enough to be able to get some perspective.

Through that stability and deepening we can begin to examine these essential thoughts: that all sentient beings want to be happy, that all beings are suffering, that there is a cessation to suffering, and that the cessation to suffering is called enlightenment.

We should examine these thoughts, because Westerners have a very complicated world. Maybe it is hard to understand that all beings wish to be happy here in the West, because here we listen to the news and we hear about people throwing bombs at each other. We hear about robbery, rape and murder. We think, “Wow, that person raped and murdered; he is a horrible person.” We condemn him immediately and forget the other side of that thought, which is that he is trying to be happy. Can you believe that? Is that not an awesome thought? People who are raping and murdering, people throwing bombs in each other’s windows – how can you believe that these people want to be happy? Yet, it is absolutely the case. All sentient beings want to be happy, but they are drunk with the idea that there is no cause and effect. They are drunk with the idea that they can attain happiness by manipulating their environment in some crazy way. It just doesn’t work.

For instance, a freedom fighter might believe if he destroys a thousand people by throwing a bomb into a building, he might attain some liberty for his people, and through that effort he will be happy. That might be his thinking, but he doesn’t realize he has killed a thousand people, and through his action has created the karma in his mindstream of a thousand deaths that can only be the cause of suffering. He really believes he is doing something good. Even the rapist and murderer – maybe he has an uncontrollable urge that is deep and profound. Where does that urge come from? Why don’t you have it? It is because he has the karma of that urge. Maybe it was caused when many lifetimes ago he threw a bomb in somebody’s window and killed a thousand people, and maybe that is why he has that urge in his mindstream now. So what does he do? He continues to rape and murder. At the moment of doing so, he thinks he will end the suffering of his uncontrollable urge through raping and murdering just once more.

That is how horrible it is, but these people really are trying to be happy. Think about that. Think about how they are suffering uncontrollably, revolving again and again in cyclic existence, helplessly, because of the karma that has infected their minds. They are helpless in the midst of the cause and effect that they have created — simply helpless. Even in these horrible cases it is true, all sentient beings are trying to be happy. On the other side of this law, which the Buddha declared, is that not understanding how to create happiness, they constantly create the causes of suffering through non-virtue.

These are things you absolutely must remember. You have to allow them to deepen your mind. They have to become as instinctive and natural to you as breathing. If you understand the infallibility of cause and effect to such a profound extent that it begins to change the compulsion you have to create non-virtue and therefore the causes of unhappiness, then you are a practitioner. You are practicing a technology that will lead you to realization. Whether you consider yourself a Buddhist or not, you are practicing a valid technology, a spiritual technology.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

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