The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Marrying Spiritual Life with Western Culture”
I remember I went through a process quite naturally even before I found Buddhism. I was sitting in front of a stream meditating, and I meditated very deeply on my essential nature—this nature that is without discrimination, beginningless and yet completely fulfilled, both empty and full, beyond any kind of discrimination whatsoever. I meditated very deeply on that. Then I found that I couldn’t tell where I ended and where the water began. It was almost a psychological “Ah ha!” but so much deeper, like “I am that also.” Well, you can’t even call it “I.” It’s suchness, and it’s everywhere. Then I started expanding that to other living things—people and bugs and any phenomenal reality that appears external. I knew the nature that I am is just as easily that. I knew blacks and whites are the same, that my culture and your culture are the same, that this and that are the same.
Memorizing that kind of understanding is a deadening experience, because something inside of you is hidden and unchanged and unmoved, and something outside of you has been laid on top of it—bash-to-fit, paint-to-match religion. That’s what that is.
We do a lot of that with religion. I don’t believe it’s the fault of religion. I think if you listen to the original teachers of almost any religion, it’s good stuff. We are the ones who do not know how to practice religion. If we understand the Buddha’s teaching, which is such a living, dynamic, eternal, present thing, it is as alive in this world today as it was when it was first brought into this world. But if we practice it today, not with the energy of recognition of intimate association, not happening in this present moment, but happening 2,500 years ago, it’s not going to work. It has to be living for you today. It has to be alive for you today. Otherwise you’ll say, “That religion was brought into the world 2,500 years ago. Things are different now.” Well, yes, so? Liberation is not different now. The faults of cyclic existence are not different now. Nothing that matters is different now. All the rules still apply. It’s just that we don’t understand them on a deep level, because we haven’t invested in feeling and knowing in intimate association with these truths. We are simply playing church.
How to understand that your faith is alive? Try being alive in your faith. The ball’s in your court, and you’re not going to get away from that. You cannot change the religion and think that it’s going to suit your needs, because then you’re doing something else entirely. You’ve already decided what it’s going to look like and how you’re going to act. You’re on a track that is unbendable, unmovable, unadaptable, and you’re going to bend things around you to fit. You cannot do that to the world any more than you can do that to yourself. Bash-to-fit and paint-to-match doesn’t work.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved
