Teachers | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

It’s About Awakening

October 1, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Sometimes I am afraid for others, because they are following a spiritual path that is very new — perhaps 10, 20 or maybe even 100 years old — a spiritual path that was simply developed by a great thinker, great philosopher or great psychologist. Although these paths mean well, and they do produce some good — in that people who are tied up in knots get untied a little bit — I’m not sure they actually produce enlightenment, because the source is not enlightened. Even if the founders of these paths were to describe themselves as being enlightened, I would want to see if the paths actually produced enlightenment in someone following them, because there are many people who are practicing paths that have not yet produced enlightenment in one single person.

So I adopt a wait-and-see attitude. I’m really hard-nosed about that. I want something that will awaken me to my nature. I want something that will produce enlightenment. I won’t give you a dime for back rubs and affirmations and good feelings because those things have not proved to me that they will produce enlightenment. I want what works.

I’m not saying there’s only one path, and that’s the Buddha’s path. I’m not saying that another path could not be revealed. I’m not saying that no one else has the answer. I am saying that if I’m going to travel across the ocean of suffering, I’m going to do it in a boat with no holes. I know that I want to practice a path that has as its source the mind of enlightenment, and I also want to practice a path that has produced enlightenment in many other sentient beings. That, to me, is a boat with no holes. You’re not going to catch me — I’m a very, very practical person — leaving shore in a boat with holes. That’s not going to happen; I’m too much of a coward.

And in my having the special joy that I feel, the most happy part is that somehow I seem to have the karma of being in the position to help propagate this path. Now believe me, I have no idea how that happened. I’m just happy that it is so. If I have the opportunity to do anyone some good, if I have the opportunity to afford someone a place to be comfortable and to be trained and to feel at home so that they can practice such a path, then I’m really happy about my life.

So, when someone says to me, “I don’t know how to deal with your change to Buddhism,” I can only say, “Don’t even bother, because you have enough to deal with already. You have to deal with cyclic existence. You’re a busy person. What you need to think about is not what I’m doing. You need to think about how you are going to achieve enlightenment. How are you going to liberate your mind from the very conceptualizations that you are expressing to me right now? How are you going to free yourself from the rigidity and the restriction, the confines of your own feelings, that run you around the block the way they do and never produce enlightenment? That’s your problem, and it’s not my job to worry about it.”

My job is to do what I am doing now. I hope to do it better and better. But this path isn’t all about me; it’s about awakening. And so I really don’t waste a lot of time thinking about how I feel or how you feel or what feelings are all about. I mostly try to rest my mind in something that is like calm abiding, because the Buddha didn’t teach me to worry. He didn’t teach me to have preconceived ideas, he didn’t teach me to be rigid, and he didn’t teach me to have lots of ideas about things. He taught me to realize the nature. And at the core of every experience, including my feelings or yours, is that nature. And it is my intention to spend the rest of my life accomplishing the full awakening to that nature and dispelling attachment to everything else.

So, you see, I am not a convert to the Buddha’s teaching. I am simply one who wishes to cross the ocean of suffering and to take everyone with me. I simply want to experience the end of suffering, and I want everyone else to have that experience too. If that makes me a Buddhist, then I am a Buddhist.

Why I Chose Buddhism

September 29, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

349809524_qgFm3-S — HH Penor Rinpoche & Jetsunma in 1985

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

I never cease being surprised when someone is personally challenged by my path, especially since I never try to convert them. I don’t understand why it should bother one person what religion another person practices. Or how one person can take it as a personal threat when someone else doesn’t believe in their god. I cannot for the life of me see where unity argues with diversity. In fact, I think that a lot of the world’s problems, at least from the relative point of view, arise because people have no tolerance for one another.

Since I have listened to many people describe to me their heartfelt feelings about what it was like for them when I chose Buddhism, I would now like to tell you how it was for me when I chose Buddhism. I think turnabout is fair play.

First of all, from my perception, there was never any conversion process. There was never a time when I converted from something else to Buddhism. The reason why is that since the time of my adulthood, I have never formally identified with any religion. There was never a time that I felt that I was going to an external god; and yet I have a very spiritual and religious sense of there being a goal, a path and a reality that is absolute or true. And I knew that that reality had no describable nature, that that reality was essentially free of all conceptualization, that that reality wasn’t a reality in a sense, because reality implies thingness. I knew that there was something that was beyond; and that beyondness was free of any ideas of here or there, or high or low, or self or other. It was free of any contrivance

I didn’t use the word emptiness at first because I didn’t know the word, but I used to think of it as being vibrationally zero. That is to say, there was no artificial construction within it, no contrivance, no conceptualization. I knew that any conceptualization or idea that one had was delusion. And I knew that there was an awakened state in which one realized one’s nature, and that nature was essentially free of all limitation. That nature is not separate, it is not other; it is not something that one must go to or even progress toward. That nature is the true nature, and one needs to awaken to it, and that awakening occurs naturally.

In order to describe that philosophy, at first I had to use general metaphysical terms. There were no other terms for me. I never had anything to do with Buddhism. I had never even read a book about Buddhism. When I met His Holiness Penor Rinpoche and I began to hear about the Buddha’s teachings, my sense was not of changing at all. Nothing of the Buddha’s teaching seemed strange to me. From the deepest part of my heart, I felt that I had come home. My sense was, “At last, here’s the vocabulary I’ve been looking for. Here are the words that I’ve needed all this time to describe what I’ve been trying to teach.” And so gradually I began to absorb and introduce the vocabulary into my teaching, because I already had students at that time.

Now Penor Rinpoche says that I’m an incarnation of somebody that used to be Tibetan 400 years ago. I don’t really know if that’s true or not. If Penor Rinpoche says what he says, then that is due to his wisdom and his kindness, and I can’t take any credit for that; and I have nothing to do with it, other than that I rely on it. I feel like I am just an ordinary person and I’m doing my best. I believe in the Buddha’s teaching. I believe that compassion will save the world. I believe that enlightenment is the end of suffering. That’s what I know.

So I’m not going to pull an ego trip and say, “Oh, when I heard the Buddha’s teaching, I recognized it, I knew it, I remembered it,” in some hokey way. I’m not going to say to you, “Oh, immediately upon hearing the Buddha’s teaching I came into my own, and therefore I knew all these amazing things.” It wasn’t like that at all. It was something like the joy you might feel if you recognized music that had been in your heart for a long time being played on the radio. There was a part of me that could recognize this truth as being truth. It wasn’t really a change. It was more like finding the right suit of clothing for my size. So if any of you are uncomfortable with the fact that I’ve changed, please don’t be; I’m certainly not. I’ve always been a Buddhist. I just didn’t have the words.

Now, I would like to tell you a little bit about what I felt in my heart when I found the Buddha’s teaching. I felt humbled to have the opportunity to practice a path that has been around for more that two and a half millennia and that has brought people to enlightenment again and again and again. Ordinary sentient beings, through the intensity of their devotion and their practice, have achieved not theoretical, but exacting, reportable and repeatable physical and psychic signs that indicate enlightenment, such as bodies producing relics at the time of death and other miraculous signs. This has happened again and again and again to guys like you and me.

Sometimes I stop and I think, “What can I have possibly done to have this opportunity? What good fortune has befallen me? What circumstances have come together over ages and ages of time to give me this chance to practice a path that really works and has worked again and again and again?”

I am awestruck that I don’t have to follow someone’s advice who is not enlightened, because I am following the Buddha’s teaching. The Buddha knows what he’s talking about because it brought him to the state of supreme realization, and it has produced enlightenment in so many beings.

Turning On the Light

September 29, 2016September 29, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Commitment to the Path”

Lord Buddha teaches us that we are wandering in cyclic existence, and that cyclic existence is tricky. We are taught that cyclic existence is like that room full of furniture, full of obstacles. You have to get through it, but lots of things are going to happen. You’re going to go through events; karmic ripenings will take place. There will be sickness. There will be old age, and there will be death. The only way you get out of old age is if you die first. These are the rules. That’s how the house works.

So that being the case, the Buddha teaches us, as well, that everything in samsara has a beginning and therefore has an ending. Literally every time you meet and come together with a loved one, at that moment, you have given rise to the parting from that loved one. These moments, these cause and effect relationships arise interdependently; and although they seem to us to be separated by time, that’s part of our delusion. Cause and effect arise interdependently.

So when we meet the great love of our life that we have waited for oh these many years, then we are also at that moment entering into the experience of separating, because it will happen. Should we attain fame, fortune, whatever it is that our society teaches us that we want, then we should understand that the moment we have achieved this very thing, we have also given rise to its end. There is nothing one can accomplish through and within samsara that has any real lasting value other than to cultivate the mind, other than to cultivate the practice. Only that brings results that are carried forward because it creates a virtuous mind and pure habitual tendencies. But not one penny of the money we make, not one bit of any relationship, other than memory, will survive death. We’ll all come together again, but it will all be different.

Lord Buddha teaches us that this is a constant, spinning, spinning, spinning in samsara. While each of us has in common the wish to be happy, we do not understand how to create the causes of happiness. We think that to have more will make us happy or to be with somebody will make us happy or to be cured of something will make us happy or to change our lives and sail around the world or whatever, that’s going to make us happy. But we find that ultimately it does not. You can travel all over the place, sail around the world, have all kinds of relationships, make all kinds of money and you will find that in the heart, you have not attained happiness. We do attain temporary happiness. I feel pretty happy right now. But having lived with yourself for lo these many years, surely you must know by now that this happiness is so, so temporary. It’s like the dew vanishing on the leaves every morning. It’s like that. That easy to lose. And there is no amount of positive thinking that is going to change that. All you can do is make yourself crazier, crazier, crazier and more neurotic. You know you are suffering. You know you’re not happy and you’re going, yes, I am. Everything is fine.

So Lord Buddha teaches us that what we have to do essentially in our path is to turn on the light. Some of the furniture we’re going to have to move, get it out of the way. That’s called pacifying obstacles, and we do that through practice. Some of the furniture we’re going to have to climb on top of. It’s just there and it’s going to have to be something we move beyond. Some of the furniture we’re going to have to get under, Maybe we could liken that to undoing some of our poisons, like the five poisons that we have within our mind stream. But whatever it is, things have got to change.

So Dharma is like that. Dharma provides us a way to turn on the light. You get the picture. You see what is in your way and you decide how to deal with it. There are methods for how to deal with it, but the big thing is eyes opened. To wish and hope that everything is going to turn out well because, you know, I’m a spiritual person, therefore, da da da, whatever, is just not going to cut it, because you are still whistling in the dark. You are walking through that room and you’re whistling in the dark. Buddhism says, “Turn on the light.”

Becoming Stable on the Path

September 28, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Commitment to the Path”

There are many different ways to practice Dharma according to our individual needs. For that reason, it behooves us to kind of sit back and get the lay of the land before we start frothing at the mouth and chomping at the bit.

The tendency is to come in here and say, “Oh, great. Well, first thing I’d like to do is start wearing robes. The second thing I’d like to do is have me at least four or five interesting malas of all different colors.” And we like to have the books. And we’d like to have a shawl, you know, a zen. Only a real one, like them [the monks and nuns]. So we have all these ideas. We think, I really want to get this where you sit on a bench. It’s such a noble thing to do. You sit there and you practice.

When we first come to the path, we have all kinds of funny, cute, but childish ideas, almost like a child viewing the world for the first time and trying to make sense out of it. But then eventually there is a certain kind of relaxation that happens when the newness wears off. And then we are able to make some intelligent choices.

When we first start in our Dharma practice, we always think we are going to be great practitioners. A couple of years later, we’re still hoping we’re going to be great practitioners. We find that it’s really taken this long to get the lay of the land, to really understand what is the relationship with the Three Precious Jewels. What is the relationship with one’s teacher? What is this about view? Why are we here? What’s this on my foot? (I told you we’re going to have fun.)

So what are some of the fundamental ideas that we have to really accomplish and become at peace with in order to make intelligent choices on the path, in order to make choices that are lasting and commitments that are real? When we first enter onto the path, we might be filled with – I’ve seen this happen so much –with a kind of excitement, maybe even a feeling of passion. But these feelings are emotional feelings, and emotional feelings come and go every 10 minutes or so. You know how up and down our emotional condition is. So those feelings, while stimulating and exciting at first, will not last and cannot be relied on.

So the best thing to do when you approach the path, is to approach it, not critically, but intelligently. Look at the path and really become bonded with it in the way that it’s almost like— well, maybe women can relate to this more—but it’s like buying a really extraordinary new outfit. I don’t know about you, but if I buy a new outfit, it has to hang outside of my closet for a little while so I can look at it and grok it in fullness. Then and only then can I actually put it on my body. So in a way, Dharma should be like that. We should really examine how’s it going to lay, how’s it going to fold. What is going to happen here? It’s like we have to look at it. Examine, examine, examine. Because once we put on the clothing of Dharma and engage in our practice, we should try very hard at that point to remain stable. That’s important. Once we engage in this close relationship with our own root gurus—when we meet the guru on the path and that hook is set and the connection is made, and we have found the potential for our liberation—then that has to remain stable. That is not the time to vacillate. So we should hang out a bit. Examine intelligently. Examine the qualities of our teacher, examine the qualities of our Vajra brothers and sisters. Then once we realize that this is our teacher and this is the place that we will practice, at that point, we are required to become stable.

The Nature of the Path

September 27, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt form a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Commitment to the Path”

I like to see students start off kind of smallish and grow bigger in their practice, because I think that is more realistic. The best way to start out our practice is to understand what Dharma is trying to accomplish—what are the faults of cyclic existence and what are the results of practicing Dharma—to get a clear idea of that so that we can see for ourselves that this is a beneficial thing, so that we don’t have to argue with ourselves further down the path when it’s not appropriate any more.

So these teachings that I would like to give you are designed to get you to progress. They are made to get you somewhere. You are not meant to stay where you are on the path. One progresses and that means change. You know, that scary word. So we have to ask ourselves then: What is Dharma engineered to do? How does that change take place? What does it look like? What does it mean?

Well, first of all, look at something that is not Dharma. Look at whatever sense of spirituality or religion you have that is not Dharma. If we look at the ideas that we have generally as a culture about spirituality, spirituality is like salt. It’s a condiment, a little ketchup on the hot dog of life. It’s a flavor, but it’s not nourishment. It doesn’t give you what you need every moment of every day necessarily, unless you yourself find a way to relate to that faith so strongly.

With Dharma, it’s a different story. You don’t ever have to feel your way around. You are never walking around in gray zone. You can do practice. You were taught how to increase your knowledge and your wisdom. You go from one practice to another to another to another through the different levels. You can move through them according to your habitual tendency and your karmic propensity. So there is something exacting, something like a method.

The reason why is that Dharma is not meant to act as a barbiturate, to calm you. It’s not Valium. It’s not meant to soothe you and make you feel more comfortable. It’s more like if you could imagine your life as being a dark room, like any other room—filled with furniture. And it’s very dark. You can’t see a thing. This is kind of your life as a sentient being, because we really don’t come into this world understanding anything about cause and effect or how to make ourselves happy. We come into this world unknowing, with only habitual tendencies. That’s all we come in with, deep habitual tendencies from previous experiences.

So in a way, our lives are like this dark room, filled with obstacles. By now, now that we’re getting a little long in the tooth, we know there are obstacles. We’ve had them. Some of them, anyway. Doubtless there are more to come. So we think of our life like this room with furniture in it and you’re supposed to get from the birth door to the death door successfully and make some progress in the meantime. Well, if it’s pitch black and there are all these things in the room, the chances that you are going to walk through without knocking yourself into oblivion are pretty slim. So the way that Dharma works is it forces you to turn on the lights. You have to look at obstacles. You have to look at what is in that room. With another kind of faith you might think that the best thing to do is think positive and be positive and plaster good thoughts on your head. You know, just try to be kind of upbeat and make the best of everything. All good ideas. But when you are stumbling through a pitch black room and there is a lot of furniture in there, you are going to trip. And no amount of positive thinking is going to get you through that room successfully. No amount of positive thinking is going to keep you from entering that last door. Nobody has done it yet through positive thinking.

So Dharma’s tendency, rather than act like a soother or a barbiturate or something that is calming, Dharma turns on the light. Dharma says, “Look folks, here is what’s happening.” You are born, but you don’t remember how you got here. There are uncountable cause and effect relationships since time out of mind that have formed into habitual tendencies and karmic propensities. And here you are born as a child. How did you get those parents? How did you get in this world? How did this happen? That’s what I said when I woke up as a kid. What’s wrong with this picture?

So we find ourselves here and we’re kind of helpless. That’s one of the teachings that the Buddha gives us. That in truth, we are all the same and in our nature we are exactly the same; but in our ordinary appearance as sentient beings, we are in a state of confusion. We do not understand cause and effect relationships, because we can only see this present lifespan. We have had so many lifespans to give rise to causes in an amazing amount of time, since time out of mind. So we have no understanding of this.

Dharma teaches us that all sentient beings, while we are the same, and while we are wandering in confusion, have one thing in common and all of our activity is geared towards that. And if you think about it, you know that it is true. Even when we are doing for others, until we really have given rise to compassion, we’re always trying to be happy. It’s natural. The organism wishes to be balanced and at peace, happy. But we don’t understand what balanced and at peace is. So we keep grabbing for stuff. Yet Lord Buddha teaches us all that we are suffering due to desire. It’s not that you don’t have something that makes you suffer, but your reaction to the not having it…that is most of the suffering.

Viewing the Guru

September 26, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo on October 18, 1995

This teaching is meant to help us correct our view and deepening in Guru Yoga. We will be thinking about how to deepen in our practice and how to practice with a deeper and more profound sense of view. Remember that the antidote that we are trying to apply now is the one that addresses our superficiality.

As materialists, modern people, and sentient beings in general, our minds are very superficial. In fact, our superficiality is literally invisible to us simply because we have no sense of what anything other than superficiality might be. As you listen to this, you should listen with your “doors” open. That means, don’t just listen lightly the way most people do. Most people, when they listen to either conversation or teaching, listen to it just skimming the surface, picking out the main points. In this case, you don’t want to use that technique. That’s okay for ordinary listening, but in this case you want to not only hear everything that is actually said, but at the same time, you also want to try to understand the concept that’s being presented in a deeper way. It’s as though you want to receive the totality of the idea, not just the top of it. You don’t want to try now to determine what are the most important parts. In other words, accept the entire teaching, and then, later on, as you begin to digest it, you’ll be able to determine what the important parts are more readily.

Generally, when we walk around in our normal waking consciousness, we think that we are with the Guru only when we are praying or doing our practice. We visualize the Guru in front of us. We think, “Oh, now the Guru must be here by the force of my devotion.” That’s appropriate, that’s what I’ve taught you. Then we think also that we are with the Guru whenever we see the Guru’s face. We think that when the Guru is actually in the room and we see the face, we see the form, and we think that we are with the Guru. If we see a picture of the Guru, maybe we have a moment of devotion, and perhaps we feel a connection because of our past practice. We think, “Oh, now we are with the Guru.” In fact, if we are really to examine the way that we are thinking at that point, it is extremely superficial. There’s no view in that at all. It’s superficial. It’s completely inaccurate. If we think in that way, it goes to show us that we have not accomplished pure view. We have not accomplished a deeper view. So this would give us a lead as to how to practice more deeply.

When we think about when we are with the Guru, we have to try to understand the meaning of our relationship with the Guru in the deepest possible sense. We try, hopefully, to move past our perception of the Guru as an individual person. This is our goal. This is what we’re trying to do, generally speaking, in our devotional yoga. We are trying to see past the personality, past the superficiality, into a more profound understanding, a more profound view.

Let’s go back to that question that we might have answered differently while we were thinking more superficially: when is it that we are with the Guru?

We are with the Guru every moment that we have the Buddha nature. We are with the Guru so long as we appear in the world but still have within us the Buddha seed. What that actually means is that the Guru represents for us all sources of refuge: all Lamas, all Buddhas, all Bodhisattvas, these three that arise from the primordial nature. The Lama represents for us the Dharma: all of the Dharma, every word that was ever uttered of Dharma teaching. The Lama represents for us as well the entire Sangha: every monk, every nun, every Lama that has ever taken robes, that has ever practiced the Dharma. The Lama represents as well all the meditational deities with all their qualities and all their particular incarnations and all of their activities. The Lama represents as well all of the dakinis and all of the Dharma protectors. So when we think of the Lama, we think that everything that arises from the fundamental Buddha nature, from the pure primordial nature, that which is our Buddha nature is represented by the Lama. Everything that the Lama represents arises from the Mind of Enlightenment.

Conversely, the Lama does not represent those things that are present in samsara. The Lama does not represent those things that increase our five poisons, that increase our delusions. The Lama, therefore, cannot cause suffering. The Lama cannot cause an increase in ignorance. In a natural way, the Lama is not capable of giving rise to more suffering and more delusion. If somehow within the relationship that we have with our Lama there is some suffering, then we have to look to ourselves as having impure perception, as having incorrect view, incomplete understanding and the tendency to project outward what is actually happening within our own minds. The reason why we know that the Lama cannot increase our suffering or increase our poisons, or harm us in any way, is that the Lama actually appears as a display arising from the very Mind of Enlightenment and within the Mind of Enlightenment there is no cause for suffering. There is actually no cause for suffering, so the seed is not there.

What’s the Point?

September 25, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Actually these teachings on the Four Noble Truths are the lessons that we are trying to implement here in this temple. One of the goals that I have personally invested a great deal in is to try to create in this temple an opportunity for sentient beings to invest their effort, their kindness, their resources in whatever way in order to bring benefit to others. I feel that this is a beneficial practice. According to the Buddha’s teachings, this is one way to create the perfect interdependent cause and effect arising in order to create the kind of happiness that we wish. The efforts that we engage in here don’t seem to bring much result at this time, in this way.

Right now, for instance, we are holding a twenty-four hour a day prayer vigil. There’s always someone in that room behind the staircase, the shrine room, who’s praying for the welfare of sentient beings. There are 12 two-hour shifts a day and we go round the clock twenty four hours a day. Now what is that producing for us now? Nothing, absolutely nothing. We lose sleep, we get irritable, we’re tired. Sometimes we don’t want to get up and do this thing. Sometimes we do everything that we can to trade shifts so that we don’t have to be there on Saturday morning. But somebody gets stuck with it, I guarantee you. Where’s the payoff? Why would we want to do that?

Let’s talk about some of the other things that we do. Right now we’re building a stupa park with eight stupas in it. In the past we’ve built the stupa that is out on the grounds toward the parking lot. When we built that stupa out there, we had weather such as we’ve had in the last couple of days. For some reason, every time we build stupas this happens. I don’t know why, but it seems to be in the high nineties, if not a hundred or over, with humidity just under pouring. You know somewhere around ninety-nine point nine. It’s just beastly weather and it’s very difficult. We get out there and we work very hard and we sweat very much. And it seems as though the effort will never end. It’s very, very hard because we do everything ourselves. Sometimes we lose weekends for a whole summer. Sometimes we lose evenings for months. We don’t get much rest; we work very, very hard.

Why do we do this? What’s the benefit? What are we experiencing right now in building this stupa park that’s so wonderful, besides backaches and sore limbs. It seems as though nothing. It seems as though we’re just working very hard for no good reason. But actually what we are doing here is we are implementing the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha teaches us that whatever we can do to benefit beings, to bring happiness and well-being to sentient beings, will bring us happiness and well-being as well. The Buddha teaches us that the point of our practice, the point of our lives, is to actually engage in meritorious, generous, wholesome and virtuous activity that will be of benefit to sentient beings. And the Buddha teaches us specifically that the only lasting permanent true cessation of suffering, and therefore benefit to sentient beings, is enlightenment. The true cessation of suffering is the state of enlightenment.

28th Anniversary of the Enthronement of Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

September 24, 2016 by anisonam

The lowing of the conch shell sounded from various points on the temple grounds like a soft foghorn. It overlaid the patter of hammers as stupa construction continued. Sometimes the sound wavered and spluttered out, and Jetsunma would laugh, lowering the conch. She was practicing for the enthronement ceremony the following day and had been told at the last minute that she would have to blow the conch. She never had before, at least not in this lifetime. She wiped her mouth and joked to her students, “I’m never going to get this down.”

She gamely tried again, continuing her gradual circumambulation of the temple. The sound came out clear and strong and hung in the air. After a moment of stillness, the students cheered.

On September 24, 1988, the temple filled with cameras and mics angled in every direction. Jetsunma sat quietly humble on the throne, and straightened the brocades draped over her shoulders, blinking at the lights. The temple had never been so brightly lit. To the blare of Tibetan horns and ringing bells, NBC filmed while His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, Throne Holder to the Palyul Lineage of the Nyingma School of Vajrayana Buddhism, formally enthroned Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo as a tulku, or reincarnate teacher.
According to tradition, ceremonial items were carried from H.H. Penor Rinpoche to Jetsunma, empowering her to teach and formally represent the Palyul Lineage. When the time came for her to blow the conch on camera, the sound came clear and then wavered. Not as good as the night before. She shared a wry smile with her students, tipping her head, Oh well. Then one of the monks had to blow the conch. His Holiness chuckled and Gyaltrul Rinpoche translated his comment, “They should have had Jetsunma do it.”

The news spread via Associated Press, and world newspapers printed photos of the spectacle of a western woman with long dark hair on a Tibetan throne. Her enthronement came at a time when Vajrayana Buddhism was relatively unknown in the US. The year before, an obscure Tibetan monk, H.H. the Dalai Lama, spoke at the National Cathedral to a scattered audience of about a hundred. At Buddhist temples in the late 1980s, teachers were universally Asian.

It was openly questioned whether westerners could accomplish this eastern religion.

H.H. Penor Rinpoche, who never shirked what was needed, answered with a resounding yes. As he enthroned her, he said, “People have asked me why there are no American tulkus. And people have asked me why there are no female Lamas. Now you have both. So you should be very happy.”

“This is for you,” Jetsunma said later to her students. “It’s for all of us really. This is your own enthronement, your own future accomplishment that you’re seeing.” She explained that the enthronement meant that not only can Dharma be accomplished, it can be accomplished by westerners, even in this day and age. “Yes, even you.” And she wrinkled her nose impishly at her students, and laughed.

Post written by Michelle Grissom

How to Understand Cause and Effect

September 23, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

We don’t have any real way to understand direct cause and effect relationships. And for that reason, we cannot really seem to understand how to create the causes of happiness. A good example is this: If we experience perhaps chronic poverty, we may think that the way to end this chronic poverty is to struggle against it. To work very hard at getting money any way that you can, to beg, borrow, or steal literally. To work very hard at a very high paying job in order to get money. What we won’t understand is that probably whatever we do within that realm of activity will have temporary result at best. It may work for a period of time. Then again, it may not. I know people who work hard and can’t seem to get anywhere. Or it may be that it works very well for a certain period of time. But, even while it works very well and you have money, the consciousness is such that you still feel impoverished. You can’t enjoy it. You can’t get anywhere with it. You can’t use it for any good result. It simply sits. And to all intensive purposes you are still impoverished. It’s very difficult to understand how it is that these cause and effect relationships play themselves out.

Now, according to the Buddha’s teaching, if you have a great deal of affluence at this time, if that is easy for you, then what has actually occurred is that in the past you have accumulated a great deal of merit through generosity, through generosity, through giving to others. And that is why, in this lifetime, it is easy for you to accumulate money, or easy for you to enjoy money, or easy for you to feel wealthy even if you don’t have much money. It is easy for you to feel that you have plenty, enough. That you’re just fine. Either inwardly or outwardly, you are prosperous. This is a hard lesson to take in. Because we want to feel that this personality and this lifetime was responsible for doing something in a very competent way in order to achieve these excellent results. But, according to the Buddha, in many cases prosperity is the result of generosity, in fact in all cases, prosperity is the result of generosity. And a person who is chronically impoverished is a person who has not been generous and continues to not be generous with their resources, with their time, and in their hearts. The Buddha teaches us the antidote to poverty is not getting money any way you can. But that the antidote to poverty is kindness and generosity and putting out in order to benefit others.

Examining Cause and Effect

September 22, 2016September 21, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

How can it be that we’ve had so little result? Well it isn’t true that we’ve had no result. We have had temporary happiness. We’ve all had that. Probably we feel pretty good right now. Probably we felt all right when we got up this morning. But we feel differently every day, and really every moment. And sometimes we are even afraid to think that we’re really happy, because we know that right behind that happiness, right behind that, is another mood change. And you know that it’s not lasting.

How we can have managed to continue in such an effortful way? How is it that we maintain this extreme effortfulness? And what’s the answer? What should we do? First of all, we have to begin to cultivate some understanding. According to the Buddha’s teaching, every condition that we experience in our lives, including the most subtle inner conditions, that is to say, our own impressions and feelings and subtle inner posturing—that very, very subtle stuff that seems so wispy, seems to change all the time with every catalyst that appears in our lives—from that kind of subtle condition to the most seemingly permanent, gross, outer condition, such as the house we live in, the nation that we live in, the community that we live in, the world that we live in, the Buddha teaches us that every one of those conditions that we experience actually arises through the interdependence of cause and effect relationships. Every condition with no exception. Even the condition of how you appear physically. Now, of course you have some control in that matter. You can diet and become thin. You can put on makeup and become better looking. You can take off makeup and become either better or worse looking depending on how well you apply makeup. You can gain weight. You can do different kinds of juggling in order to make yourself appear more attractive through wearing different clothing, or what have you. But there are some things about which it seems that we have no control. For instance, the genetic tendency of our body to be in a certain way. Some people are shorter than others; some are taller. Some have a tendency towards a more squat body form; and others have a tendency towards a very lanky body form. These things seem to be beyond our control. We can look at our parents and our grandparents, and it seems as though we have the same genetic structure as them. It seems as though we have not much control over that. But, according to the Buddha, even such things as those that appear to be handed to us from the time of our birth, even such things as genetic predisposition, these are the result of karma.

What are the conditions of living? Do we live in a beautiful house? Do we live in a happy and harmonious family situation? Do we own property? Are we impoverished? What are the conditions of our lives? It seems we have control over some of them. There are many books out now that tell us we can all become millionaires through a certain amount of effort if you follow this very simple ten point program starting with the investment of a few thousand dollars. And for some people I’m sure that kind of program has worked. And yet, there are some conditions in our lives that are seemingly unbeatable.

For instance, what if, personality-wise, we don’t seem to have that certain mindset that permits us to engage in that kind of activity? And then again, what if we don’t want to? Some feel chronically defeated and have always felt so, and they never take aggressive moves towards gaining whatever it is that they want. But other people seem to have to do nothing and happiness comes to them, or prosperity comes to them. There are so many conditions in our lives that seem controllable and they’re mixed in with conditions that seem uncontrollable. How are we to understand that?

Well, the Buddha teaches us that we have at best a very partial, very minimal understanding of cause and effect relationships. It’s actually quite minimal. And the reason why is that there is very little cause and effect unfolding that we can actually see. The Buddha tells us that we’ve lived many more than one lifetime. Therefore, if we’ve lived a hundred years already, we have only one tiny, tiny window of time in which to judge our experience. But that window of time actually has a very exacting beginning and a very exacting ending; and it’s very difficult to understand what has come before and what will come after. There are certain elements that we can view within that window of time, and we can gain some understanding. It has been my experience that usually as people mature and as they become older, they have gained enough life experience not to make certain kinds of mistakes again and again and again. Now, in some cases I think it might be that we’re just too tired and old to make those mistakes again and again and again. But in other cases I think there’s a true learning that has actually occurred, and I’m really not sure what the proportions are.