prostrations | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Why Such Effort?

November 23, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Antidoting the Mantra of Samsara”

When you come here and you ask yourself what has to be done here, the answer is: It’s not just hanging out being a Buddhist. I don’t really care if you’re Buddhist. I just want you to be liberated. You can call yourself whatever you want. To hang out here and be a Buddhist is probably equal to going to a movie; but to hang out here and really practice and really apply the antidote, now that’s worth something. And that’s the kind of frame of mind you have to be in and think yourself in when you actually approach the path. You can see, however, how confusing it must be. As sentient beings, we can’t understand why it takes such an extraordinary effort. I mean, the other religions are much easier. So why wouldn’t we want to practice that? Because according to the Buddha’s teaching, we are much more complicated than that. We are samsaric beings and we have been for a very long time. We are filled with delusions. Our minds are just jammed with discursive thoughts of all kinds. We are constantly engaging in conceptual proliferations, superstructuring. We cannot relax in our nature and awaken to the primordial state.

This is why it’s so complicated to practice Dharma as we do. These are the kinds of things that people ask: Well, why can’t we get through this easier? And then we want to know, why do we have to do prostrations? Why prostrations? I mean, couldn’t we just be devoted standing up? Well, then you have to ask yourself why you’re asking that question. And you might say “Well, it’s because I don’t like the getting up and down business. It’s too hard. It’s too tiring. It makes my back hurt and I just don’t want to do it.” And so that’s your answer. You get up and down every day—dance the jig, carry on, do all kinds of amazing effortful activity in order to continue in samsara. How many calories do we burn every day? What are we doing when we’re burning those calories? Are we plowing forward towards Dharma? Are we moving through the door of liberation? No. No. No, we are going deeper and deeper into samsara. That is where our effort is involved every single day. So when we ask ourself, “Why does it take such an extraordinary effort?”, then we have to go back ourself. Do we understand what the goal is, what the point is? Until we understand why we’re doing this, and why we’re here… And it isn’t just to hang out.

There is something that actually needs doing in order to attain liberation. Otherwise liberation is not a fact, not a certainty, not a state, not a real goal. It’s simply an idea just like any other idea. Something that’s floating around. It’s just a word, it has no meaning. So instead, depth is required. Repetition is required. Contemplation is required. Thought is required. Attentiveness is required. Determination is required. Understanding is required. You must go into this path more deeply than perhaps you’ve ever done anything else. It doesn’t mean that you have to spend every single moment of every day in the beginning simply contemplating the Buddha’s teachings. I’m not asking you to forget how to catch a cab. That’s not what I’m saying. Or to forget how to cook dinner. But I am saying that we should be aware in the beginning that what we are trying to accomplish is possible, but only if we really understand what it is, what the goal is, and how extraordinary the goal is and therefore how extraordinary the effort must be in order to achieve the goal. Because it must be that extraordinary or you’re just doing something, another something other than the other somethings that you’re already doing.

Stopping the Merry-Go-Round

June 24, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Antidoting the Mantra of Samsara”

Now, during this practice, with our whole body we’re purifying body karma arising from the non-virtuous activity that we have engaged in since time out of mind, when instead of going for refuge, we went for ice cream. So instead, now we are actually using our body, speech and mind—using the body by making prostrations, using the speech by reciting, and using the mind by remaining absorbed and visualizing. Now we are training in the same way that a body builder trains a muscle. He develops and trains that muscle by pumping it and working it and working it. Now we are working to sharpen our focus, not to be simply reactive and discursive the way we are in samsara going towards meaningless goals with no distinction whatsoever. I mean, we’ll follow anything!

Instead of going for meaningless goals that have no meaning whatsoever, instead now we are training body, speech, and mind to be single-pointed for the first time. This is pretty amazing! I mean, think about it. For the first time, single-pointed. I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma and the Sangha. And if you do it with your body, speech and mind, the potency of reciting that 100,000 times is extraordinary! Simply extraordinary! I mean, completing 100,000 repetitions of the refuge mantra and prostrations is an extraordinarily life-changing experience. It’s like stopping the merry-go-round for a minute. If you were born on a merry-go-round and your movement was invisible, and then suddenly you stopped, don’t you think that something inside of you would go, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! What’s this? This is new!” And that would be the beginning of a new kind of experience. And it takes the weight of that kind of practice to make that happen.

Your Potential

June 15, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Dharma and the Western Mind by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

One of the most difficult concepts for Westerners besides the idea of emptiness of self-nature and some of the thoughts about the Nature of Mind that the Buddha teaches us are thoughts about devotion. I think it is because we have grown up in a society where it is very important to be important. We are very egocentric really. We have this idea of individualism as being the optimal thing; the idea of the self being fully developed and fully actualized in some way, the idea of developing all of your qualities and talents, whatever they may be. Developing all of your different talents has become so central to us that when we see that in Vajrayana Buddhism it is the custom to do three prostrations to the teacher we become appalled. As Westerners, our first thought is, does this mean that I am less than this person, do I have to subjugate myself, do I become some sort of wimp? What happens to me when I do that? Does this mean that I am kind of useless somehow?

You should understand that there is nothing in this path that will undermine what you inherently are. In fact the point is for you to awaken finally to your real nature, to your true nature. There is no way, there is no room, and there is no space on this path for you to be undermined in any way. In fact in this path you are recognized to be something that you never thought you could have been. Your potential to be a Buddha is fully recognized, male or female, high or low, whoever you are, that potential is fully recognized by your teachers and that is the point of teaching you.

When you comply with the custom of doing three prostrations and of honoring your teacher you are purposefully cultivating devotion, because the teacher is seen as the door to liberation and the motivation of going through that door is love. You want to be of benefit to beings, you want to accomplish Dharma so that there is an end to suffering. You want to return again and again and again in whatever form necessary in order to be of benefit to beings and the teacher is seen as a door that you walk through to get there. The teacher gives you the Dharma. The teacher offers you the technology. The teacher acts as the catalyst by which these things are realized and for that reason the teacher becomes a feast; the feast that you have always hungered for. When you prostrate to the teacher you do not prostrate to the person.

My name before I became Ahkön Lhamo used to be Catharine. Do you really think that anyone is really prostrating to Catharine? She is not that great. No one is that great really, but what is great is the door to liberation that your teacher offers you. What is great is that awakened nature that someone who has experienced some realization displays. That is what we prostrate to, not the person.

So you shouldn’t be shy about that or uncomfortable with that. If you don’t want to do it that is fine but don’t feel funny about other people doing it. Try to overcome the different blocks that you have as Westerners so that you can practice Dharma purely and sincerely.

Remember the whole thing is about being of benefit to sentient beings and about loving. As Westerners that is what you have to stabilize your mind with, you should cause yourself to understand these things, turn your mind; cause yourself to only want to do those things that will produce the result that you want – love. Motivate yourself to be stable on this path because the result of this path is the awakened state, and that state is of benefit to all beings, especially those who have hopes of you.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Developing Spiritual Discrimination

May 28, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

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

One of the things that is very unique about the Buddhadharma is that it is not a “Sunday-go-to-meeting” religion. It’s not the kind of religion where you go on Sunday and Christmas and Easter, or whatever your particular holiday happens to be, and the rest of the year you’re just where you are. Buddhism is different in that it is a path. In a way, it is a nonreligious religion. You have to think of it as a path that one walks consistently, faithfully, and deeply. There is relatively little benefit from practicing Dharma in a superficial way. Learning one or two mantras and walking around saying some prayers but not really training the mind in a deep and profound sense of the View will be a lot less effective. Also, our tendency is to become dry, and not remain moist on the path. The heart dries up. If there is no profound investment in establishing the View and establishing mindfulness, the result will be greatly weakened, greatly crippled.

Mindfulness is one of those subjects that one can take to the depths of one’s practice and its many aspects display themselves in different kinds of practice. Before I talk about the first aspect of mindfulness, let me address some difficulties we have as Westerners, particularly. Because of the very nature of our culture, there are so many different things to do, and we are inundated with philosophies and religions, both old and new. We are inundated with different kinds of experiences that people call “spiritual.” The reason I’m so mindful of this is because I lived in Sedona, Arizona, and Sedona is known for that. People mistake any kind of experience that feels deep as a “spiritual” experience, not able to discriminate between something that feels spiritual and something that is an actual commitment and movement on one’s path. There really is a difference between a mantra and a backrub! There really is a difference between the various experiences that people have that they call spiritual and an actual path that one practices consistently with the intention of benefiting beings. This lack of spiritual discrimination is the greatest problem that we have in the West. You can see how it is symbolically, even to go the grocery store. If you send your child to the grocery store to buy bread, you’ll have to specify what kind of bread, what brand of bread, because on the shelf are a million different kinds of bread. Other cultures might be a little bit different than that, especially third world cultures. There, when you go to buy bread, you buy the bread they have, and that’s pretty much it. Bread is bread. In the same way, their faith is their faith. It’s not something that one tastes and tries and then tries something else. That discrimination is sort of built into the culture. We don’t have that, so our need to practice discrimination is much stronger. We have a tremendous need for that.

Discrimination is best practiced through changing one’s habitual tendency. On the path of Buddhadharma, if you really step back from it and look at the different categories of practice, you’ll notice that, basically, the Buddhadharma is about applying the actual, exact antidote to the subtle and gross forms of suffering that we endure. The Buddha has taught us that we suffer mostly from desire and that suffering is ongoing and that it is all-pervasive. But we also notice that that desire takes many forms, so there are practices in the Buddhadharma that are meant to specifically pacify pride and ego and that ego-clinging self-cherishing. There are practices in the Dharma that are meant to apply the exact antidote to a lack of generosity, to selfishness and greediness and just wanting, wanting, wanting — that kind of suffering. There are practices in the Buddhadharma that are meant to help us shake ourselves out of the kind of slothful mental attitude that so many of us have which is a kind of sleepwalking that we do through the days and years of our lives. This is actually a quality of mind and in Buddhism it’s labeled ignorance. Ignorance is not lack of education in Buddhism; it’s lack of wisdom. For that reactive or slothful mind, where the mind doesn’t stop and evaluate and use its energy to determine whatever direction it’s going in, in the Buddhadharma there are antidotes to that as well.

In fact, when you study the Buddhadharma, you really have to think about the Buddha as being like a doctor and samsara as being like the sickness and the Dharma as the nurse that feeds the medicine to you all the time. So in this spiritual discrimination, it isn’t a theoretical, vague idea. This ideal of mindfulness, of discrimination, actually needs to be practiced in a very exacting way, for the very reason that we are in a culture that goes in exactly the opposite direction. We are in a culture that does not teach discrimination, really, in any form, particularly about spiritual issues.

How can we practice spiritual discrimination? How can we formulate that by which we can begin to grow the ability to distinguish? How can we learn to discriminate between what is truly of the mind of the Buddhas and what is ordinary and simply arising from the phenomena of samsara? What is the method by which we can actually establish the View? In the Buddhadharma, we are always looking to apply an exact antidote. You have to think about samsara as being like a poison and that there is an exact formula that is the antidote to that poison. In trying to develop discrimination and mindfulness, it is best to hold ourselves to a kind of ritual or task that is evident and visible. One of the strongest antidotes to being stuck on the idea of self-nature as being inherently real, (which is really quite different from enlightenment) and for lack of spiritual discrimination – not being able to tell, in a spiritual sense, the difference between a diamond and a piece of cut glass — is called Guru Yoga.

Guru Yoga on the Vajrayana path is extraordinarily important. It is not important because the Guru needs it nor because it’s even pleasant or fun for the Guru. It is not for any ridiculous or stupid reason like that. The reason that we practice Guru Yoga is because our minds, when they are samsaric and therefore fully engaged in the cycle of birth and death, are a little bit deadened, sort of flat-line. Just the energy or pulse of engaging in a relationship between oneself, which appears separate, and other, constantly creates a feedback loop that makes for a kind of dullness and stupor. This non-recognition of phenomena as actually being a display of our own mindstreams keeps the mind deadened to the View. In that state, it is so like us to take a spiritual minister or presenter of some kind and, because they have tremendous charisma and slick words, because they have a real routine going, we would put them in high regard and think, “Oh, this must be the Word of God,” or “This must be the Word of Spirit.” There is the inability to discriminate between that and a very deep practitioner, a silent bodhisattva (one who has not been publicly recognized). If a silent bodhisattva were to walk into the room, we wouldn’t sense that. We wouldn’t know what that was because there’s no display, no show. One of the methods that we use is this throne on which I sit, and it is not because I like it. Actually, it’s kind of uncomfortable. This throne is not here because it’s pretty, and it’s not here for any superficial reason. The Lama sits higher in order to indicate to the student the difference between this speech and the speech we hear every day. So in your mind, in the student’s mind, the throne is high, and it’s a reminder for you. This is a clear indication that in our lives we need some kind of ritual or some kind of visible habitual pattern that we engage in, in order to develop true spiritual discrimination.

The Nature of the Teacher

August 30, 2015 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

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

The most important thing you can do to develop spiritual discrimination is to elevate the Root Guru. The Root Guru is the source of how you have come to the path, is the root teacher who gives you the preliminary teachings, is the one who hooks you onto the path. For these reasons you elevate your teacher in such a way that you begin to awaken. You are not awakening to the appearance of the teacher, but to the nature of the teacher. Again, eventually, you will be able to see, not your own appearance, but your nature, and that’s the goal here. That is the point of practicing Guru Yoga. Otherwise no one else would care, because certainly the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas don’t need it. They’re happy the way they are. The Lamas offer themselves to be used in that way. We have this extraordinary opportunity. So it behooves you to accept that offer and use the Lama. It behooves you to take the opportunity to see that this is the appearance of Dharma in your mind, of Dharma in your life, and to lift it up within you in your mind. Lift it up and see it differently from the other ordinary things that are in your life and be able to distinguish that. You want to be able to get past the point where you say, “Well now, I like this about the Lama; I don’t like that about the Lama; I do like this about the Lama, I don’t like this about the Lama, blah, blah, blah.” That’s what you’re doing about everything. That’s what we do about each other and, most of all, about ourselves. This mind training is meant to wean us away from that kind of conceptual proliferation. It is meant to allow us to begin to taste the nourishment of pure View.

Those who have known me for any length of time know that my practice is all about Guru Rinpoche. There are many reasons for that. One is that I have a strong connection with Guru Rinpoche. That’s my great fortune and my great blessing. In my mind and in my heart, there’s nothing else. I don’t see anything else. I’m not saying that I’m a great practitioner, but I’m giving an indication as to how this could work and what kind of formula we can develop in our own practice and in our own quest for mindfulness. When I think about my practice with Guru Rinpoche, I look for him everywhere. I look for the speech, for the method, for the intention of the Guru everywhere. My experience has been that when I ask Guru Rinpoche for help, for receiving strength, receiving health, receiving whatever it is that I need in order to be strong enough to be of benefit to others, it is always there. Even though I haven’t had the training from childhood that many other Lamas have had, when I ask Guru Rinpoche for help, it is always there. There have literally been times when I have not known what my class was going to be about until I got there to teach, and sometimes those are the best classes, because I know that I am nothing but a vessel that Guru Rinpoche’s blessing simply pours through.

We are not talking about being falsely humble. Remember that when you do prostrations, you always get up. We don’t lie on the floor for hours! We get up, and the reason why we get up is because that’s what’s supposed to happen. Through prostrating the body, through practicing this with body, speech and mind, it is our nature that rises up. The ego gets laid down. We lay that down, and the nature is what rises up. Symbolically that’s what’s happening with prostrations. It’s all about learning to have View in a different way.