Red-blooded Buddhist

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

Now, I’m a red-blooded American.  You can’t get any more American than born in Brooklyn to an Italian father and a Jewish mother.  That’s as American as they come in this world.  So I understand our culture. I don’t claim to have any special powers or abilities; in fact I could study Lord Buddha’s teachings for the next twenty thousand lives. It’s the same for everyone: until you reach supreme enlightenment, you don’t understand the Buddha’s teaching, because to do that you must understand the Buddha’s mind.  I feel that I am a beginner.  But one thing I do understand is that as Westerners we have not yet come to understand what our objects of refuge are.  One of our main sufferings, and the cause of more suffering, is that we take refuge in the wrong things.

As a culture we have not come to understand the value of using this life as a vehicle to achieve supreme realization.  Even for those of us practicing Dharma, it takes a long time to understand that the only value of this precious human rebirth is to achieve enlightenment.  Here in America we have the most precious jewel of all: the leisure to practice.  If we don’t have the time, we can make the time.  You can.  Try it.  You can.   We have the leisure to practice.  We have the ability to study.  We have within our grasp a true path that has proven again and again and again it can produce enlightenment.  We have these precious things, and yet we don’t understand that the only point of this life is to end suffering, not only for ourselves but for all sentient beings.  Because once we ourselves achieve realization, we can contribute to the end of suffering in a real way for all sentient beings.  For all others.

We tend to think of our lives in a very different way, because we don’t understand what our objects of refuge are.  We try to live our lives with immediate gratification. We think, “Well, I have to be busy because I have to have this and this and this and this and this and this.  I have to buy this, and I have to have this and I have to attain this.”  We don’t accept that maybe it is possible to live a completely successful life under a completely different set of rules.

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