Right Mindfulness

An excerpt from a teaching called the Eightfold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Right mindfulness has to do with cognition.  Everybody perceives.  We all have perception.  If you took any two people and asked them what their perception of a certain situation was, or even to describe a certain situation, it would be radically different.  And it’s not that they remember differently, it’s that they saw differently.  That’s the interesting thing.  The cognitive process begins with the impact of phenomena and how it meets our habitual tendencies.  It’s that meeting which is our perception.  If we were able to perceive something, such as a person, without moving forward in cognition and having opinions, and concepts and ideas about that person, life would be beautiful.  If we could just meet each other metaphysically naked and accept one another and let it go at that without hatred, greed or ignorance. Oh mani pedma hung.  What a wonderful world that would be.

But that’s not our habit.  Our habit is that when we see a person, we decide, “I don’t like what he’s wearing.  That’s not my color.  I don’t like that haircut.  I don’t like him.  I don’t like the way you wear your robes.”  You know?  We have all these opinions.  And of course we keep them to ourselves and smile but it’s those opinions rattling around in our brains that are causing us so much trouble.  We never stay with a mere impression and leave it wholesome.  It never happens unless we are practicing right mindfulness.  It takes a supreme effort to practice like that.  We conceptualize.  We write our own inner script for instance.  We have an original perception and we react toward it.  Reaction is the name of the game of the five senses.  Whatever that reaction is we build a story about it.  And then you have a whole house of conceptualization wrapped around that person.  And it has nothing to do with them.  But you projected your whole brain onto them.

What we do is we interpret according to our own thoughts and experiences.  And here’s where the conundrum is.  If we haven’t practiced proper view for instance or engaged in proper effort, then when we come down to mindfulness, its going to be really hard to unscramble things, and what we are going to have left is our usual habit.  And that is conceptual proliferation.  Two people can have exactly the same experience and react 180 degrees different.  And it’s all because of our previous habits, our previous judgments.  Judgments don’t go away.  They pile on top of each other.  And pretty soon, you have a formula, and once you have a formula, it’s over.  So, the mind then posits concepts.  Joins concepts into constructs and weaves those constructs into complex interpretive schemes. Its what we do.  We can get all turned around and wrapped up in our little mental conflagrations, and somebody can come up and say, “Well, I saw it this way, boom, boom, boom.”  And suddenly your whole game is down.  What do you do now?  Another person has a completely different view about it.  But you’re still circling around the path.

That’s how sentient beings do.  And on the path the job is to bust that game.  Really bust that game.  Very difficult to do but its possible.  And does it take a short time?  Can you do it in a weekend?  No!  It will take the rest of your life and then some more lives, if you don’t go to Vajrayana, and then achieve liberation in the bardo.  If not, you have to practice the Eightfold Path for lifetime after lifetime after lifetime.  That’s how long it takes.  Nobody is being mean to you.  That’s how long it takes.

We make up all these complex constructions.  Most of it happens only half consciously and for some people it is completely unconscious, but for some of us, its only semi conscious.  I’ve come to understand that sometimes a person acts oblivious.  They act like they do not know the effect that they’re having on another person, and you corner them.  You break it down with them.  You find out that they actually know.  But they don’t want to deal with it.

You know on some level.  It can be a very subtle level, and maybe somebody like a friend or a therapist has to help you bring it out or point it out for you, because it may be so subtle that you didn’t catch it.  It’s not that you don’t see it, it’s that you don’t catch it.  That’s why it helps to work with your Vajra brothers and sisters and be willing to receive their thoughts about you.  For instance, the ordained practice sojong, and sojong is wonderful because you really open up in front of the other ordained and you become metaphorically naked in front of your brothers and sisters.

Sometimes it helps when someone points it out, but really if you sat down and honestly little by little practiced self-honesty and looked at yourself, you could get a long way ahead.  Be willing to love yourself through seeing how naughty you can be.  What an absolute jerk you can be from time to time. “Oh God, I can’t stand that I did that!”  But you have to see it. It helps.

So, when we practice right mindfulness, we become aware of the conceptualization part because in order to practice right mindfulness, you have to study your own reaction.  Play this game with a friend.  Have somebody brought over that you’ve never met before.  Bring them into the room when everybody’s eyes are closed, and then open your eyes and look at the person.  And watch what your mind does.  Don’t obsess about the person.  Watch what your mind does.   Your mind is going to run all over that person from the shoelaces to the hair barrettes.  You’re going to notice how they dress, how they smell, how they look, what their expression is.  And all of these things are going to form into a pattern for you that means something for you, and probably is your projection on that person that has nothing to do with that person.  It’s really interesting.  I think one of the most fascinating parts of the path is when you really get to know your own perception and you can see how it works, and then you can move on.  You can forgive yourself for it, and move on.

What we are trying to do is practice mindfulness, which is a clear perception.  A perception, which is free of all these constructs.  A perception that’s more naked.  Where you just behold a person.  If you could manage not to engage in all that impression stuff, and construct stuff and story making and all of that, you could actually see that person’s true face.  You could actually behold their capacity, their Buddha nature.  Nothing would stop you from loving them.  What’s not to love in the primordial wisdom nature?  The fact that we don’t have that kind of love is because we are stuck in wrong mindfulness.  We are literally wrong-headed because we let our minds run away with these concepts and ideas, even to the degree that we say, “This person’s really got it in for me.” Even your own child, you think, “God, this is a plot.  This kid is plotting to drive me nuts.”  What parent hasn’t thought that? Of course we all have, but that’s crazy thinking.  That’s your human projection.  So, when you catch yourself with that, back up. Ask yourself, “What do we have here?  We have a child.  A child that does what children do.”  Or if it’s an adult human, “What do you really here?  Well, you have a human being with all that amazing potential and that capacity to be Buddha.”  Wow!  What if you could look at everyone and perceive that?  What a joyful state to be in.

If we give rise to right mindfulness, we become aware of our process of conceptualization and the way that we can construct it into scenarios and stories and use that as the foundation for mindfulness.  Just as I’ve been saying.  You use it to examine every reaction that you have.  You look at it from a distance.  You say, “Oh, that’s me having that reaction again.  Oh.  Interesting.  Where does that come from?  Wonder about that?”  The very act of stepping back from an instant reaction gives you something that’s called spaciousness in the mind.  The very act of just stepping back.

Most creatures have no space in their mind at all.  I don’t mean literal space.  I mean metaphorically there’s no relaxation.  Everything is automatic reaction.  Take for instance, a snake. A snake is like a reaction machine.  If you stick a rat in front of it, it’s going to act predictably.  And if a snake in the wild is frightened, it’s going to act predictably.  Species wide, you can predict how a snake is going to act.  There’s no space in that’s animal’s mind. It doesn’t even have enough space in its mind to say, “I’m hungry.  I’m going to catch me a rat.”  It doesn’t do that.  It just goes.  It goes and does what it does as a response to feelings.  And the response is bam, bam bam!  It’s like a nerve firing.  Almost plant like in the sense that a plant will react to stimulus.  Too much sun, it will go down.  Too much cold, it will go down, but it is an automatic thing, like a Venus Flytrap.  Did you ever see one of those when you were a kid? Do you think the Venus Fly Trap says, “I’m hungry.  I want a fly!”  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t even have that capacity.  If anything touches it, it could be a toothpick, and it will grab it.  So, that’s having no space in the mind.  Plants don’t have any mind, but a snake is a being that has a brain but has no space.  When you are able to practice being able to step back and say, “Oh.  Look at that reaction.  Wow.  Well, that’s a whole load of horseshit I had connected to that.  My goodness.  Well let’s back that up and unpack it, shall we? “  When you start thinking like that, you start to develop some spaciousness in your mind, and you have a little bit of time between perception and reaction.  That’s when you start to practice!  That’s it!  Once you have that going, and not every practitioner does, that’s when you’ve got it.  Stepping back from reaction is a real milestone in practice, and it comes by right mindfulness.  By perceiving, and catching your perception.  What’s your perception?  What’s the trigger?  What’s going on here?  What do you perceive?  What’s the story that you are living?  Step back and see what’s really happening.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Right Action

An excerpt from a teaching called the Eightfold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Right action involves your physical body as a vehicle of expression, and it refers to deeds that we do with our body – our physical conduct.  The Buddha taught that unwholesome actions lead to an unstable, unwholesome, and unhealthy state of mind.  The principal is explained in terms of abstinence.

Right action means to abstain from harming sentient beings and especially to abstain from taking life, including one’s own – suicide, and doing harm intentionally or delinquently with your body to others.  In other words, if you hit somebody or cause harm, if you get so angry at somebody that you punch them in the face, that’s not going to bring happiness, and definitely harms sentient beings. If we harm other beings or bring about their death by hitting them or smashing them with something, then we have brought about a cause that will result in our own death in the future.  We have harmed our own life as well, as you have harmed someone that you professed to uphold on the previous steps on the Eightfold Path.   You must never do that.

When we engage in the Eightfold Path, we don’t allow anything to be killed in our presence. If we can stop people from killing bugs, and never kill bugs ourselves, that’s the right way to go, because all of them are sentient beings, and they are all equal to us in their nature.  We do not kill dogs.  We do not kill cats.  We do not kill people.  We do not kill animals.

Regarding the consumption of meat, the way the Buddha taught it, is if somebody is going to kill an animal for you to eat, don’t do it.  If the animal is already dead, as you would find meat in a supermarket, then that is acceptable to eat it because it is already dead.  It is not going to come back because you didn’t eat it.  But if you can prevent the death by not accepting anything that has been killed for you, never getting involved in slaughter, then that is the basis of it.  Slaughtering animals in a slaughterhouse, or raising animals for slaughter for butchering would be wrong livelihood.   Wrong action and wrong livelihood merge together and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you are talking about one or the other.  The point is it doesn’t matter.  It’s the whole picture like a lotus.

You abstain from harming sentient beings, and especially from taking life.  You abstain from taking what is not given to you, which includes stealing, robbery, fraud, deceitfulness, and dishonesty.  Regarding what is not yours to give, rather than to steal it, you should practice the rest of the Eightfold Path, and purify yourself of the desire.  Work with the desire, work with the phenomena, work with the root of it, and the way of it, and the result of it.  Having done those things, there should be no desire to take from someone else or to have what somebody else has.

Here is an example of one way to cultivate that.  Lets say you are practicing the path, and your friend gets a new car, and it’s just the kind of car you wanted.  You just wished you could have had it.  And you regret that it wasn’t you.  You just think, “Boy, I wish I could have that car.”  Now, you’re not going to steal the car probably if you are practicing the path, at least I hope not, but you have to examine the basis of not being happy for your friend, and wanting the car to be yours. That very idea of desire is the problem there.

Never take what is not given to you.  Never steal.  Never rob.  Never commit fraud.  All of this will bring great suffering.  It basically destroys one’s mind.  If one engages in deceitfulness and fraud, the mind becomes sick.  You can’t think straight anymore.  And it actually results in mental illness.  There is so much confusion.  You know how it is when you start telling lies.  You have to keep on top of it, because pretty soon you’ll be telling different stories to everybody and you forget what you lied about.  Have you ever seen kids do that or you?

Yeah, you should respect the belongings of others, and be happy for them in the sense that, “Oh my friend got a car.  I’m so happy for her.  I can see her joy.  I rejoice in her joy.”  Even if at first you have to say, “I rejoice in her joy” through gritted teeth.  Keep doing it enough, and go deeper each time, eventually you will be joyful about the happiness of others.  It really works.

Right action also has to do with abstaining from sexual misconduct.  Positively formulated, Right action means to act kindly and compassionately, to be honest, to respect the belongings of others, and to keep sexual relationships harmless to others.  It doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

Regarding sexuality it depends on your level of ordination.  For a monk or a nun, any sexual activity is improper sexual activity because they have taken vows of celibacy.  For householders it’s different.  But still in all, one should never try to get with another person’s spouse, or to get with someone who is an improper age, or to get with somebody who would be harmed by getting with you in some way.  Lets say there is a person that doesn’t have proper mental capacity and they don’t know better, and yet you get with them and it really harms them.  That would be absolutely wrong action.  So, sexual relationships should be wholesome, healthy, and not harmful.  You should never harm another with that.  You will suffer.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Right Intention

An excerpt from a teaching called The Eight-Fold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

All of us have intention, and intention refers to mental energy.  We have intention now, but we are not really conscious of our intention.  We don’t think of it that way other than when we say, “I intend to go to the movies tonight.  I intend to wear my new dress tomorrow.  I intend to eat broccoli for dinner.” We have that kind of understanding.  But what we don’t understand is that intention goes with mind power.  They are the same.  And mind power when it is expressed, has intention.  Whether we like it or not, if we have mind, we have intention.  So, the mental energy that controls our actions is our intention, and that intention.  Maybe we have a nihilist point of view.  We don’t really think that life is cause and effect.  We don’t have any understanding of that.  “Wherever life takes me; I’m going to go there.”  That’s kind of neutral.  And of course, with that kind of neutrality, life will take you anywhere it wants to.  You have no control.  You are like a doughnut on the ocean. You are going to take on water and sink.

Right intention is about formulating an appropriate intention, and it has to do with ethics.  Ethics in the Buddha dharma are absolutely foundational.  Once we get into the higher practices, we neglect, I think too much, to talk about it.  Right intention is absolutely important to cultivate.  Otherwise the mind is simply wild.  It wants what it wants.  It just does what it does.  There is nothing to think about.  If we have bad intention, of course that gives rise to great suffering.  Like if we wish to be higher than everybody else, or we wish to be more powerful than everybody else, or we wish to be richer than everybody else.  That’s kind of a negative intention.  It is okay to have wealth, it is okay if you have some power, and it is okay if you’re pretty, but to have that wish to be prettier or more powerful or wealthier than everybody else, that’s not good intention.  And that will cause you to suffer because someone’s always going to be prettier than you.  Someone’s always going to be richer than you.  Someone’s always going to be smarter.  And so you’ll suffer.  It brings about suffering.  Negative intention should not be tolerated.  Not only does it bring about suffering for oneself, but also it brings about suffering for sentient beings because if we have poor ethics or if we have bad intention, we tend to harm others, as well as ourselves.

So we are supposed to train ourselves with good intention, for instance, the intention of renunciation.  To have the intention of renunciation again is so important and foundational on the path.  What are we renouncing?  Well, you could go and renounce things piece by piece, and get absolutely nowhere.  “I renounce bottle tops.  I renounce red drinks.” And then get totally neurotic about it, “But I want it.” That obviously is not the right approach.  The intention of renunciation actually refers to resistance to the pull of desire and attachment.  You begin to practice that resistance.  I promise you that when you just start to practice it, you won’t be good at it, if you have no experience with it.  It takes time.  You have to examine desire.

Now, you understand that desire is all-pervasive.  I’m not talking about what happens in people’s bedrooms.  I’m talking about all-pervasive desire.  Desire for everything that we want. And we want a lot.  We want good days, we want good experiences, we want good friends, and we want good times.   None of which are bad, but if you’re addicted and attached to them, then you will suffer.  And again the Eight-Fold Path is about liberating from suffering.  So, it is the renunciation to the pull of desire and the poison of attachment.

Right intention also is the intention of good will.  Meaning resistance to the feelings of anger and aversion.  We all have that.  It starts in the morning.  “God, who made this coffee?  It tastes awful.”  “I’m having a really terrible hair day.  I’m averse to my hair.”   We have this aversion, and then we just don’t like things. Don’t like people.  Don’t care.  Just don’t give the big hoop.  I would call that wrong intention.  If someone were to approach you and say to you, “I think it would be healthy for you to practice more compassion.”  Of course, our natural thing is to react with “Shut up!” and to react with anger. But that is the exact instinct we need to fight.  That is the exact thing we need to fight.  Now, if somebody comes up to you even if they are somebody you may feel doesn’t have that much compassion, and they give you the piece of advice, “I think you should have more compassion.”  You cultivate patience and right intention.  You think, “Well, it is good that person is talking about compassion, even if it is a left-handed gift.  Still there is something there, and you can have some good intention, good attitude about it.

Basically you develop good will towards all sentient beings.  You don’t think that animals should be killed or harmed. You don’t think that dogs should be put to death.  You don’t think that people should be at war.  You don’t think that suffering should occur.  You don’t think that poverty should exist.  These are right intentions.  These are right thoughts.  Right thoughts that can be cultivated even on a very personal level while the path you’re traveling is still very personal.  You think like that.

You start to pacify anger and rage.  So many of us have so much rage stored up.  Some of it is from childhood.  Some of it is from the stress of everyday living. Were we really meant to go 60 million miles everyday?  You know that kind of stress.  We hold rage inside.  And so part of the Eight-Fold Path is to begin not to suppress the rage, but to contemplate it, be aware of it, and look through it.  Suppression equals neuroses.  We are looking for you to be awake to perceive more correctly what the nature of attraction and repulsion actually is, how they are not conducive to happiness and are the antithesis of the path.

The last part of right intention is the intention of harmlessness, meaning not to think or act cruelly, violently, or aggressively, and to develop compassion.  We forget that.  Again a foundational truth on the path, and we forget it.  We walk around with our malas and our robes, and we think, “I’m so cool.  I’m a Tibetan Buddhist.”  Well, you are not Tibetan.  And if you act like that, you’re not much of a Buddhist either.  So, forget it. And of course cruelty, if we have any cruelty in our mind, it may be a reflection of past habit or past incidences.  We have the power to examine that cruelty, to see its root, to see its fruit, to push it away, to see through it in other words, into the true nature of the Eight-Fold Path and of the Buddha dharma.  We have that power.  We shouldn’t think, “Oh, I’ve got this rage, and I’m stuck with it.  It’s just there.”  We have the power to change that by practicing this right intention.

We give up the thoughts of violence, of aggressiveness, and we begin to develop compassion.  And again what is it based on?  It’s based on the Four Noble Truths.  The compassion comes from the realization that all sentient beings are suffering.  That suffering is all-pervasive, and that it is not necessary because there is an Eight-Fold Path.  That is our way to contemplate and to bring ourselves up to snuff with right intention.

© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo All rights reserved

Right View – The Essential Nectar Drop

An excerpt from a teaching called The Eight-Fold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Right view should be understood as the underpinning, the beginning and the ending, and everything in between on the path.  It is in some ways the essence, the essential nectar drop of the path.  In right view through meditation, through contemplation, and through receiving teachings, we come to understand the nature of samsara. We meditate on samsara and understand its flaws, its faults, and how it is so confusing to all of us.  By understanding the nature of samsara, we know what to avoid and what to pick up.  But without contemplating on and understanding the nature of samsara by remaining constantly in a reactive stage, there will be no accomplishment. We grasp what is impermanent, what is imperfect.  We begin to contemplate and study the empty nature of phenomena.  That phenomena is what it seems to be, yet even now we know from the scientific world that it isn’t what it seems to be.  It seems to be this way, but we know that it isn’t.  We know that for instance that on the surface, the nature of glass, the nature of wood, the nature of material, all of it is basically molecules with a bunch of space in them.  And so while they appear solid, its all really energy, electromagnetic energy that binds molecules together.  It is not the way it appears to be.  We have the habit of seeing what we see.  But when one is awake, phenomena is basically empty of self-nature.  And subtle energies, the very display that is samsara is understood in its nature.

In order to attain right view, you don’t have to be smart.  Even though the people that are teaching it often use these wonderful big words, “all pervasive this,” and “foundational whatever.”  And you think, “Wow, this sounds like you have to have a PhD to understand this.”  And it’s not true.  Correct view or right view isn’t about smart.  It’s about wisdom.  It’s about experience through contemplation and meditation.  Even if you don’t have the big words, you can have a direct experience through contemplation. It begins with the insight that is brought to bear by having meditated on the Four Noble Truths in that we understand that all sentient beings are suffering.  We begin to realize that desire is the problem, to understand the nature of reaction and attachment, and to understand the nature of phenomena and the truth that the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas prevail and are indeed omniscient and powerful.  They have brought us the path and they remain.  In other words it is the awareness and belief in the Three Precious Jewels – Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

We all have view.  We have view right now.  We are viewing each other.  I’m viewing this lady’s pretty necklace, and I’m viewing my daughter, and I’m viewing you.  We have it.  Whatever we think in our mind, when we are viewing, this is our view.

To practice Right View, one trains the view. One trains so that when you look at somebody you don’t say, “I like him or I don’t like him.”  You don’t react with attachment or repulsion.  Right View means that you train yourself to see differently what is.  For instance, say I am Caucasian and you are a black man.  I look at you.  If I say to myself, “Oh, I’m Caucasian, and he’s a black man.”  That’s my view.  That’s what I’m seeing.  And in the Buddha dharma, it is not correct view.  Not correct at all.  Because we are to understand that within each of us, we are equal and we have the Buddha nature and that view is so completely superficial.   If we look at someone else from another culture or family or another planet, and see only the differences, right view would be to correct that.  It would be to see the sameness, to wake up to the fact that all sentient beings are inherently equal and that we share the same nature.  I may be one color and you may be another but we share the same nature, and there is no color on that nature.  So, this is where you begin.  You see how this is a foundation where you become mindful and thoughtful?  It’s not a generation stage practice where you are actually doing a puja, but it’s where you contemplate the fundamental meaning of the path.  Having trained oneself in Right View, its so much easier later on when you begin to approach the bodhisattva vow and the compassion that we learn in Mahayana Buddhism, because with Right View as the foundation, we are half way there.  We can have compassion for others.  We can uphold others as the same as ourselves.  And we can do for others what is kind and good to do.  If we understand Right View properly and we have done the preliminary contemplations, then in Vajrayana it is much easier to have proper view with Vajrayana meaning.

In Vajrayana meaning we should see every female as the goddess, and every male as a god. We see each being in their truer nature.  And we respect the women as being dakinis.  We respect the men as being dakas.  We respect, that is the View in Vajrayana.  And nobody’s higher than anybody else except in the practice of Guru Yoga where we actually use the Guru as a focus to understand our own nature.  But we’re not there yet.  We’re still on Right View.

So it behooves us to contemplate the meaning of this, and how to approach viewing others, viewing your life, viewing your potential, and viewing the world at large.  This is mind training.  This is where you train your mind.  If you don’t train your mind here, when you get to the higher levels of practice, you are too wobbly and unstable.  You can practice real well for a while, but then you are gone.  You must have this underlying stability, this understanding in order to really practice the path well and keep flourishing on it.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The Origin of Suffering

An excerpt from a teaching called Eight-fold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I have known of cases, it is very rare, and beautiful to behold of people who have gone through terrible terrible suffering and have used that as a way to become strong.  In fact there are entire cultures of people who through tremendous need to survive and tremendous suffering, have found some way to become strong through that suffering rather than to let that suffering take them down.  But that’s very rare.  Most people react to suffering as though something outside had occurred to them, and they were merely standing there.  They don’t understand the relationship of cause and effect, and how karma prevails, and always is exacting. If you give rise to any cause, that very effect will occur.  We don’t realize that, and so we react in an odd way.

What causes our reaction is our deep attachment and desire for things to be as we wish.  For instance, if we have to live on beans and rice all week because we don’t have enough money for steak and potatoes, we might think, “Oh this is terrible suffering.  This is just so terrible.  But then another person might say, “I really dig beans and rice.  Take the Beano and you’ll be fine.  What’s the problem?”  I’m being funny now, but you get what I’m saying.  It’s really your reaction.  One person can have some catastrophe happen to them, and they will use that almost as a guru to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get stronger.  But most of us don’t.  We react because we don’t have our heart’s desire.  So, if we lose a relationship that is very dear to us, a death happens or loss of friendship or loss of love, when we really look from a practical sense at what changes in our lives as a result of the loss of this person, most of it is manageable usually.

What’s really terrible is our own pain.  Our own pain is caused by our attachment to that person and our desire to be with that person.  Attachment to a person or a desire to be with a person is not necessarily a bad or unethical thing, but understood within the context of the Buddha dharma, we must understand that too much attachment and not enough unconditional positive regard for all sentient beings – placing all of our hopes and desires on one person or maybe a small family – means that our suffering will be very great at the time of losing that relationship.  We know that whatever comes together must also separate.  Whether it is in life or in death, nothing remains and everything is impermanent.

It is our reaction that causes us to suffer.  One person can lose a job or a position and totally flip out, and ruin the rest of his life simply by the thoughts and activities that he takes while he is not stable or in good shape.  Then another person can take a challenge like that, examine himself, and say, “What’s going on here? Maybe I should change this or that about myself?”  There are many ways to react, and what the Buddha has taught is that the suffering is caused by desire and attachment and the purpose of practicing the Buddha dharma is to pacify and lessen that desire and attachment.  Another way to put it is to see through its narcotic effect.  We want what we want.  It stimulates us and makes us happy.  Then we want more.  But if we really examine the desire and attachment, we’ll find out that most of what we cling to is relatively unimportant and in the end, will bring us suffering because we are too attached to it.  So, the Buddha taught that the origin of suffering is attachment and desire.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Back to Basics

An excerpt from a teaching called the Eight-fold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Recently it has come to me very strongly that if we lose sight or connection with the very foundations of the path of Buddha dharma, we tend to lose our way eventually.  There are well-documented, well-preserved teachings that Lord Buddha gave that are very pristine and very concise.  They concern the first turning of the wheel of Dharma.  This is what Lord Buddha taught during the time of his life.  As the Dharma grew and spread, there were other developments within the Dharma.  So, there are basically three levels of the Buddha dharma.  One is called the Theravadan point of view, the original teachings that Lord Buddha himself taught.  There is the Mahayana point of view, the accomplishment of the original teachings, and the addition of the idea of wisdom and compassion – primarily the idea of the Bodhisattva vow – this was all taught by highly realized Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.  Then there is Vajrayana, which is what we actually practice, and which has a lot of ritual to it.  A lot depends on the inner rather than the outer display.  It is powerful yet subtle.  There is technology that goes with it, and as one accomplishes the technology, one begins to advance and change and move ever closer toward awakening.

We should never consider the first level of Buddhism to be somehow lesser.  Instead we should think of the first level of Buddhism as the absolutely necessary foundation.  If you don’t accomplish and don’t understand what Buddha originally taught, then there is no real understanding later on.  I would consider it to be something like building a house.  If you are building a house you don’t want to build it on a sandy beach where it slopes down to the sea and the waves are big.  You want to build it on a very firm foundation.  You want to pour your concrete slab, and make it really secure.  When you are practicing the path of the Buddha dharma, it is very good to understand these primary teachings.  To understand their meaning to the degree that as you move further on the path, you can always reflect back on the original teachings to give you context, strength, and inspiration.  It is necessary to understand exactly what did the Buddha taught.

When we talk about the Buddha teaching, we say, “turning the wheel, an expression meaning, “give the dharma.”  The symbol of dharma is a ship’s steering wheel, an eight-spoke wheel, and it symbolizes the eight-fold path.  “Turning the wheel” is a symbolic way of saying, “teaching the eight-fold path.”

When the Buddha first turned the wheel, he taught the four noble truths. The Buddha himself was considered peerless, fully awakened, fully developed.  Having experienced all of the content of samsara and nirvana, through his realization, and in his awakened state he was able to take all that he saw, and make it concise, something very understandable.  Small in words, but big in meaning. This is what the Buddha taught.  You can’t argue with it.

He first taught that in samsara or in life, suffering is all-pervasive, meaning that life is suffering.  We don’t like to think of it that way.  We prefer to think that we’re happy, and we try to coax ourselves into a happy mood.  Still if we look around we see that there is suffering wherever we look.  The human suffering is old age, sickness, and death.  I’ve experienced two out of three, and I know I’ve done the other one but it is hard to remember.  We all know that this is true.  Human beings suffer from old age, sickness, and death.  You can try to think positively about it, but we all know that when it gets down to it, when you’re sick, you feel rotten, and if you are critically ill, it is so much worse.  It’s horrible to have your own body betray you.  If you get to the point where you are experiencing old age, we can look at Madonna, and we can look at all the different wonderful people who have kept in shape and all, and we think, “Oh, its not so bad.”  Its bad!  Getting old is bad.  For those of you who don’t believe and are too young to know, it’s bad. And that is the suffering of the human realm.

Each different realm has its own form of suffering.  For instance, animals suffer from fear and stupidity.  An elephant is much stronger than its trainer, and much stronger than the means usually used to contain them, but they don’t know that.  Elephants are very smart in their own way, but in that particular way, they are not so smart.  In India you see bullocks pulling carts and what not, and their whole life is just toil and work.  They experience the whip if they don’t do it.  That stupidity keeps them there.  I mean, they could basically turn around and knock the driver senseless if they so chose.  They are powerful animals but they don’t know that.  And so that’s the suffering of the animal kingdom.  That and fear since in the animal kingdom you are either prey or predator.  And even predator can be prey sometimes.  So fear is rampant.

The Buddha taught that everywhere you look, suffering is all-pervasive.  That no matter what a person’s life looks like, there is suffering.  And then he taught the cause of suffering is attachment or desire.

When we come from a materialistic society and an ordinary world, we think to ourselves, “How can that be?  Suffering is when you don’t have enough money.  Suffering is when you get hit by a car.  Suffering is when your beloved child grows up and does drugs or something.”  We can name all of these sufferings that happen to us, and so it is hard for us to understand how desire or attachment can actually be the cause of suffering. The way it is explained is that while things do happen and they are caused by our karma, the cause and effect relationships that we have given rise to in the past, and we see our karma ripening as events that seem to happen to us.  What really makes us suffer is our reaction.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

What’s Your Goal?

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Ask yourself again and again, “What’s the goal here?”  If you are more interested in expressing your fundamental, uncontrived, primordial nature which is free of discrimination, free of that which is complete and that which has just begun, in a joyful, symphonic musical way with wings?  If you are more interested in giving flight to what is precious than in following a dogma or a religion or playing church, then you are going to be an excellent practitioner.

On the other hand, if you are interested in playing church and you have a time clock for this and it’s just a thing that you want to do, part of your life, then that will be the result.  If you practice religion only to make your life different, then you will have a different life, but if you practice wisdom and Bodhicitta in order to awaken, if you recognize everything as inseparable from you, if you are able to move into the posture of moving through the sacred as that which you are, as something precious, then I think you’ve got a shot at it.

That’s going to take you working at it and you’ve really got to determine this for yourself.  You have to build the marriage inside of you.  Don’t make the mistake that we make in ordinary marriages, waiting for the romance, hoping that the path will somehow woo you so that you can feel good about the path.  That’s not going to work.  It’s a lot deeper than that.

What I’m suggesting is that you really take this into your heart, really consider this, turn the page on a new kind of life.  You can start today.  Supposing you were never to take another bite of food into your mouth without offering the nourishment of that for the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings and giving thanks and realizing the divine, precious inseparable nature of that food.  Supposing taste for you became more like chameleon than yum, yum.  Think about that.

Supposing love and friendship became for you a holy sacrament rather than a way to fill your time.  Supposing the spiritual life became for you an expression of something that exists and fills your heart, rather than something that you’re doing in order to look a certain way.  You know you want this.  You know you want to feel it to the depth of your heart.

Why won’t you be your own best friend?  Take yourself by the hand and give birth to a truly spiritual life.  I don’t care if you call it Buddhism.  I do care that you practice compassion and Bodhicitta.  I do care that you awaken to the primordial wisdom nature.  I do care that you begin to understand the sublime nature and emptiness of self and all phenomena.  This I care about very much, but what you call it is up to you.  Call it love. It’s about really going for it, really taking it in until it’s yours and bonding with it.

Practicing the path the way we’ve practiced it is kind of like having a baby and putting it up for adoption and checking in on it every once in a while and  expecting to have the same kind of bonding and connection that you do with a child that you nursed with your own body and gave your own milk to and formed that kind of unbreakable connection with.  What a difference.

Don’t make spirituality in your life the bastard child.  Let it be your life.  Let you be that.  And of course you are.  You are the ground, the basis, the primordial wisdom nature.  You are the movement and display, which is also called method, and you are the result.  And it only seems like we’re on the path now because it seems like we are traveling toward the result, but in fact nothing is going anywhere.  You are not moving.  Nothing is far away from you and there is nothing to uncover or to build or to establish.  It is simply the precious awakening, and to truly live a spiritual life you must understand that this is your nature.

Transform your life into the sacred, the sacrament, the beauty that you long for as though it were an external thing, and I’m asking you to do it by 1 o’clock.  The reason why I’m naming this time is because it’s so simple.  It’s just as simple as what you’re doing now.  In fact, it’s much more simple, because what you’re doing now is feeling separate from the source, separate from your path, neurotic and needy.  And by 1 o’clock you could have that all fixed.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Express Your Nature

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I’ll tell you something about myself which may sound odd, being as I’m sitting on this throne in the middle of this Buddhist mandala here. I’m not a religious person.  I do not like spiritual dogma!  I do not like religion as I see it practiced.  I wish that I had a more comfortable seat, but I have connection with this particular method and so that’s the display or form that it takes, but the underlying reality, the thing that wrenches my heart, and makes everything about my life without choice, is that I know no other way to live other than to see my life as an expression of my Nature.

I have watched myself throughout the course of my life.  I have made choices that are so difficult, but they were never about the spiritual.  I have moved on and I have left things and I have walked into things and I have done all kinds of stuff, but when it comes to the spiritual unfolding in my life, there has never been a choice about that.  In any event in my life, if I have had to choose continuing on with the expression of my Nature, this spiritual clay that is unfolding here, or engaging in some ordinary activity, which would not facilitate that sacred life, there has never been a choice.  I will always choose the sacred.

It’s not that I’m patting myself on the back, it’s just the way it is. I never have chosen and I think it’s because I’m not religious or dogmatic.  I don’t see religion as separate from me. I don’t see dogma as something I have to pick up and carry around.  I see my life as being innately spiritual and I see that there is no other way for me to express myself.

For each one of you I make the same recommendation, that you each find a way to experience that kind of intimacy with your spiritual life, to realize that you’re not doing anything or anybody a favor.  You are simply expressing what is true.  To try to find a way to understand that the ground or basis and the movement or method and the fruit or result are simply three faces of the same reality, and that reality is you.  There is nothing that you are doing here that is strange or exotic or unusual.  You are expressing your nature.  What else would you do?  Not express your nature?

Each one of us has to find a way to really get that for ourselves.  That’s your challenge, isn’t it?  Haven’t you as you’ve matured throughout the course of your life, as an older person or middle-aged person and, however old you are, haven’t you looked back at earlier times in your life and realized that you didn’t know how to really engage, that you were kind of absent, that there is a certain kind of absenteeism that we practice with when we are less mature in our lives.  Do you remember what it was like to be 15 to 18?  You haven’t yet grown a brain. And later on with maturity you realize, “Whoa!  I’m in my life!”  Later on it happens spiritually and it’s even more profound on a spiritual level.

When you’re a young practitioner you realized that in a somewhat unconscious way that you were simply trying to do what this Lama tells you and trying to do what the Buddha says.  You were just doing stuff.  But then, later on as you mature on the path, you begin to realize that there is something here that is like the amplification of your own voice or the rays of your own sun or some movement that is a natural display of your own nature.  You realize that there is a connectedness about the way that you lived.  You begin to move into the maturity of that.

On the path that is really necessary for us.  It requires that each one of us take responsibility in an individual way, not relying on the structure of the temple for this one to come to you; not relying on the capacity of the teacher to empower, deepen and ripen our minds; not relying on the Sangha to support you and give you that shot in the arm that we need all the time.  In the same way that you do when it comes time for you to marry on an ordinary level, you find what in you connects with that.  You begin to understand the union of this, begin to find how it is that you are a spiritual being and how it is that the path has appeared.  You begin to take responsibility for this connection, for this marriedness and it is not about vows and commitments to something outside.  It’s about walking in a sacred life as a person fully endowed with the natural capacity, the method and the potency of result in order to attain Buddhahood.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Think Before You Leap

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

For those of us practicing the Buddha Dharma, there is the tendency to act and practice like new practitioners.  When I say new practitioners, I don’t mean practitioners that have been practicing for only a week or six months or two years.  We act like a culture of new practitioners, which we are.  The Buddha Dharma has only recently been introduced into our culture.  Our culture is more determined by Judeo-Christian thought than it is by Eastern thought and so many elements of our culture do not comfortably embrace the way the path is taught, including our language, and most especially the way that we live – our life style.  We are in a culture that is materialistic and extremely competitive.  These two ideas of competition and materialism are taught to us as virtues from childhood and so “collecting things” or “going somewhere” are very pivotal ways of viewing our progress through life.  For those of us on the path, that becomes somewhat difficult, and we have to translate what is basically innate Eastern thought into a western context or culture.   I think that I am good at that because I was born an American and I think that’s helpful, if one has some understanding of the path.

Our problem as we face either beginning on the path of Buddhadharma or continuing on the path, is the sense that the path has to become really married or bonded with the way that we utilize our mind and our perception. We have not really been able to do this yet, even if we’ve been practicing for some time, even if we are wearing the robes, even if we have a daily practice that we are extremely committed to.  It tends to be the case that we don’t actually bond or marry with the path in a way that is truly intimate and lasting.  Unfortunately, we tend to externalize the path.

What are the reasons for that and how does it manifest?  First of all, in our culture and way of thinking, we externalize everything.  This is not unusual.  Everything that we see is a road in front of us.  Of course this isn’t only typical of our culture.  It’s typical of the way that human beings perceive things altogether, but particularly in this culture we think of things that must be accomplished and things that must be collected.  We find ourselves facing something that is in front of us, a path that is in front of us.  And although the teaching of the BuddhaDharma is extraordinarily different from spiritual and esoteric philosophy as we understand it in this Judeo-Christian society, we are not able to make that transition.  We practice Buddhism like Christians, which is really not how Buddhism ought to be practiced at all.

If we understand the source of our misunderstanding and how it is that we externalize the path, we can begin to repair the damage and begin to rethink and reassess.  The great thing about us is that we can learn.  We are that particular unusual kind of computer, which can learn from its own programming, reassess and reevaluate.  We are capable of that.  If you watch us in our lives, you’d never know it, but we are capable of learning.

If you are practicing a method that did not arise from the mind of the Buddha, from supreme enlightenment, you are not practicing a path that can also result in supreme enlightenment, because the seed and the fruit have to match.  An asparagus plant will not produce an apple.  They have to match.  It’s one of those fundamental, commonsensical, “2 + 2 = 4” kinds of reality that we like to conveniently leave out on a regular basis.

Why do we do that?  Is it because we have a particular shtick that we need to fulfill about what religion is all about?  Is it preconceived notions that we have?  Yes, there are elements of that, that’s true, because we are intellectual people, we have formed ideas that are difficult to change once they are formed.  We have the habit of clinging to ideas almost in the posture that if our ideas were to change, the result would be so mind-blowingly chaotic that surely we would die.  We have this habit of wrapping ourselves around our ideas in a very firm way.    Flexibility, of course, is an unheard-of skill.

That’s certainly one reason why it is difficult for us to think logically about the path.  Another reason why it is so difficult is that, if you really examine us, we have very little familiarity with, or habits geared towards, really thinking something through, from cause to result, in any area of our lives.  We like to take these flying leaps at reality.  We like to take these great plunges thinking, “I want that and I’m here, so jump!”  It’s that kind of thinking.  Just jump!  And jump again!  But heaven forbid, don’t stop and think what cause would produce that result.  We don’t have that habit.

We spend a good deal of our lives incapacitated in certain ways because each one of us has a particular problem to deal with.  Some of us may have confused mental states.  Some of us may have really strange habitual tendencies that produce unhappiness for us again and again.  Many of us engage in patterns that we just can’t seem to shake and they always produce for us these habits that make us unhappy.  When we make ourselves unhappy, we withdraw from that unhappiness and we whine and we blame the faith and we blame the people next to us. We take these flying leaps at our lives without really thinking through any kind of cause and effect relationship.

We have been given definite teachings on what kind of virtue and activities produce happiness, but we don’t want to practice virtue.  We want to take flying leaps. We’re used to it and we don’t want to change.  Regarding the path, it’s the same way.  We see the path as being in front of us.  It has certain characteristics, and so we see ourselves as separate from that and we take a flying leap in that general direction, without thinking out what is original cause, what is the basis, what is the method.  What is the result, and how to really reason that through.  We don’t seem to be able to do that.  We seem to like to take these flying leaps.

Oddly enough, we expect that these dramatic, utterly unfounded and ungrounded flying leaps are going to make us happy. So we spend most of our lives just thrashing and flailing around.

In most regards, we don’t have the habit to understand the relationship between cause and result.  It’s a particular kind of delusion that seems to go hand-in-glove with our human reality.  When it comes time for us to really become intimate with and marry into the path, we look around for some way to do that, and the difficulty is obvious.

For many of us who have been practicing for some time, when we engage in the path we will try to make the path its own satisfaction.  If we understood the basis for the path, and what the fundamental underlying ground of the path actually is, and what the result of practicing the path in a certain way will be—not because it’s magic, not because the signs point in that direction, not because of superstition, but because ground and result cannot be separated—we would begin to understand that in fact, under those conditions, the path disappears.

The path as a separate entity then doesn’t exist, not in the way that we understand it.  It becomes inseparable from our own primordial wisdom nature, our own Buddhahood in its causative, seed form, and it becomes completely inseparable from the full-blown result of Buddhahood, actual awakening. If you understood this, you would not be engaged in thinking, the way we do now,  “Okay, today I’m really going to get into my practice.  So instead of doing an hour of practice I’m going to do two hours.”  What kind of thinking is that?  I mean, yeah, at some point you might have to decide how much time you have to put into it, but that’s not what it’s about.  That’s not going to make a bit of difference if that’s the approach.

The kind of thinking that we have now also is “I’ve been out of it with my practice and so now I have to get back into my practice.”  Even that kind of thinking is deluded thinking.  To get back into your practice means that you’ve walked away from something that is infinitely connected, completely inseparable from that which is your nature.  You can’t walk away from that.  No matter where you go, there it is.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The Three Faces of the Path

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

When we think of the path, we think of something that is external, separate from us, something in front of us that we have to move towards or attain.  A different understanding of the path might be that the path is something that actually engages with what you might call three faces.  But these three faces are very much like us.  You could say that each one of us has at least three faces.  Each one of has the face of anger or discontentment, the face of joy, and the face of balance or contentment.  There are many different faces that we have.

The path also has faces and when we truly study them we can understand what the nature of the path actually is.  You could say that the path exists as part of a three-part system and if you were to think of the path itself in a true and more profound way than we normally think, you would understand that there is no way to tell where the path begins and where the path ends.  We would understand that comprising what we call the path are three faces which are (1), the ground or basis from which the path arises, (2) the path or movement itself, the display of that source or fundamental nature from which the path arises, and (3) the fruit, which is the direct result of that fundamental nature as well as the direct result of the activity of that fundamental nature.

These three things, the ground, the path and the fruit or result cannot be separated in any way, shape, manner or form.  The moment that we begin to separate these three aspects, we have lost touch with what the path actually is.  We have lost touch with an intuitive understanding of how to practice the path, and we experience a great deal of delusion concerning the path when we separate ourselves from the understanding of the threefold face of the path:  the basis or ground; the movement or path itself; and the result of the path.

Without this understanding, anything that we do becomes a path.  Any activity that we engage in becomes a method.  That method connects something with something or it wouldn’t be a method.  But on the path of Buddha Dharma we have to remain connected with the ground, the method, and the result.  These three have to be considered as threefold.

How is it that we can use this understanding to determine the validity of the path and to remove from ourselves the tendency toward delusion? First of all there is the teaching on the relationship of the seed and the fruit.  There is that kind of good old-fashioned, common-sense wisdom that if you really want to have an apple tree in your orchard, you’ve got to plant an apple seed, that if you wanted an apple tree in your orchard and were to plant cabbages, it simply would not work.  You would have cabbages, not apples.  If you wished for some apples and you were to plant asparagus, that’s not going to turn out really well for you unless you really determine that asparagus is your thing.  I know it sounds like I’m being silly and belaboring this point.  The moment we get it, I’m going to stop nagging about it, because as yet we haven’t got this one and it’s really, really important.

The Buddha Dharma is not a path or a method that arises in any common or ordinary way in the world.  In other words, someone didn’t get born at some time and simply compose a path.  A team of experts or technicians didn’t get together and engineer a path.  NASA didn’t design this one.  This path was not a dream or a vision that someone had about twenty years ago that remains unproven or insubstantial.

The path of Buddha Dharma as we know it only arises when the condition of the Buddha nature appears.  It arises from the mind of enlightenment – the Buddha nature.  Lord Buddha did not begin to teach the path, although he had attained varying degrees of what you might call cosmic consciousness or something like that, before he actually attained supreme enlightenment.  He had various degrees of consciousness that he could communicate and various qualities that he could teach to others—teachings on compassion, Bodhicitta, practicing meditation—but in fact he did not teach until he awakened into the primordial nature that was his true nature, Buddhahood.  And then at that time he was able to display the path or method to the world.

The path or method actually came forth from his realization.  It did not come forth even one millisecond before his realization.  Once he achieved that precious awakening, he was able to bring the path to the world.  During the course of Lord Buddha’s life he discovered that there were many different displays of consciousness, many different levels of attainment and attunement that one could accomplish and he did accomplish many of these before that ultimate moment.  But it was that ultimate awakening that he presented to the world as the Buddha Dharma.

The seed of the method that we practice is enlightenment, the Buddha nature itself.  It is not the human nature.  If it were the human nature he would have taught before that precious awakening and that would have been something from the human capacity.  But it was not until supreme realization that he began to teach the method and he taught only that method which leads to supreme enlightenment.  So the seed and the method are completely married and not separable.

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