Buddhism

Spiritual Technology

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

You are at the beginning. You have arrived at the door to liberation. You are knocking on a door that opens to the end of suffering. You have a tremendous capacity here, and in order to utilize that capacity you have to begin to utilize the technology being offered you. That technology is very simple: you have to soften and turn your mind. Whether you are a Buddhist or not, in order to achieve any realization at all – in fact in order to continue in a steadfast way on a path without being pulled away by the craziness of your own mind – you have to develop stability. That stability has to be based on the softening and gentling of your mind. You have to free it as much as possible from discursive thought, and from the conceptualization associated with the belief in self-nature as being real. You have to free it enough to be able to get some perspective.

Through that stability and deepening we can begin to examine these essential thoughts: that all sentient beings want to be happy, that all beings are suffering, that there is a cessation to suffering, and that the cessation to suffering is called enlightenment.

We should examine these thoughts, because Westerners have a very complicated world. Maybe it is hard to understand that all beings wish to be happy here in the West, because here we listen to the news and we hear about people throwing bombs at each other. We hear about robbery, rape and murder. We think, “Wow, that person raped and murdered; he is a horrible person.” We condemn him immediately and forget the other side of that thought, which is that he is trying to be happy. Can you believe that? Is that not an awesome thought? People who are raping and murdering, people throwing bombs in each other’s windows – how can you believe that these people want to be happy? Yet, it is absolutely the case. All sentient beings want to be happy, but they are drunk with the idea that there is no cause and effect. They are drunk with the idea that they can attain happiness by manipulating their environment in some crazy way. It just doesn’t work.

For instance, a freedom fighter might believe if he destroys a thousand people by throwing a bomb into a building, he might attain some liberty for his people, and through that effort he will be happy. That might be his thinking, but he doesn’t realize he has killed a thousand people, and through his action has created the karma in his mindstream of a thousand deaths that can only be the cause of suffering. He really believes he is doing something good. Even the rapist and murderer – maybe he has an uncontrollable urge that is deep and profound. Where does that urge come from? Why don’t you have it? It is because he has the karma of that urge. Maybe it was caused when many lifetimes ago he threw a bomb in somebody’s window and killed a thousand people, and maybe that is why he has that urge in his mindstream now. So what does he do? He continues to rape and murder. At the moment of doing so, he thinks he will end the suffering of his uncontrollable urge through raping and murdering just once more.

That is how horrible it is, but these people really are trying to be happy. Think about that. Think about how they are suffering uncontrollably, revolving again and again in cyclic existence, helplessly, because of the karma that has infected their minds. They are helpless in the midst of the cause and effect that they have created — simply helpless. Even in these horrible cases it is true, all sentient beings are trying to be happy. On the other side of this law, which the Buddha declared, is that not understanding how to create happiness, they constantly create the causes of suffering through non-virtue.

These are things you absolutely must remember. You have to allow them to deepen your mind. They have to become as instinctive and natural to you as breathing. If you understand the infallibility of cause and effect to such a profound extent that it begins to change the compulsion you have to create non-virtue and therefore the causes of unhappiness, then you are a practitioner. You are practicing a technology that will lead you to realization. Whether you consider yourself a Buddhist or not, you are practicing a valid technology, a spiritual technology.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

A Few Words on Reincarnation

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

Now, from my point of view, if you don’t believe in reincarnation you have no access to the technology of Buddhism. You have to accept the idea you have lived before, and that some of the results you see ripening in your life now are ripening due to causes created in a time you do not know. And that some of the causes you are creating now – because you are creating causes constantly – will ripen in a time you cannot see. If you don’t accept that, Buddhist or not Buddhist, you cannot evolve in your mind; you cannot adapt and have the strength to continue. In fact, you cannot have the perspective to practice the antidote to suffering. Everyone who has ever been considered a living Buddha on this earth has taught reincarnation. So maybe you might want to consider it an idea that you could adopt.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

It’s the Law

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

The Buddha says that all sentient beings are suffering and that enlightenment is the cessation of suffering. But we forget that enlightenment is the cessation of suffering. As a Buddhist you say, “Oh, yes, I’ve learned that. I practice the Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind. Enlightenment is the cessation of suffering. I have that memorized.” Oh, really? I must ask you then, why do you still practice the technology of suffering? Because until you achieve supreme realization, you are still practicing the technology of suffering. You realize this, and yet you continually create the circumstances that make you suffer. Here is why we do that: we have forgotten the other infallible law, the law of the certainty of cause and effect.

We have a problem. We are locked in to our own limited perspectives. We are in finite bodies, therefore our minds perceive in a finite way, a way that is natural for a finite reality to be perceived. Within this context, we can see that certain cause and effect relationships are absolutely unchangeable, that they always happen, that they can’t be messed with. We can see that if we pick something up and then drop it, it will fall.

Now, you may say that cause and effect doesn’t always work. There is magic, there is prayer, there are miracles. Okay then, pick something up, anything, and drop it, and stop it from falling. Let me see you do it. Who can do it? If you can do it, then I am going to buy your story and the class is over. Until we can figure out how to do that, it is certain if something is dropped, it will fall. It is also certain if you stick your hand in fire for long enough, your flesh will burn. It is certain if you never eat you will starve. It is certain if you catch a disease you will be sick. These things we understand.

It is also certain that everybody gets old. But the strange thing about us is, while we are still young enough to have a little twinkle in our eye, we will continue to convince ourselves that we will never get old. What we do is unbelievable. I have done it myself, so I know. Each year we buy something new, a little wrinkle remover, a little under-eye cover-up, and each year we still convince ourselves that nothing has changed. Then eventually, none of that stuff works. Then we have two choices: we can either face the facts or consider surgery. Whatever we do, we are putting off the inevitable.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Want a Taste?

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Excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love series

From the first day that I began teaching until the last day that I ever have the opportunity to teach, I will invariably speak of compassion. If compassion were ice cream, by the time you finish with me you will have tasted every flavor at least 475 times. So, now we will talk about another flavor of compassion.

Previously, we have discussed why compassion is necessary. Then we spoke about how to begin to apply that compassion. We talked about various ways in which one could be motivated by compassion, as well as thoughts that you might have found moving or encouraging and that were geared to deepen and soften your mind. These are very important. One of the greatest, most precious jewels that you will hopefully attain in traveling the Buddhist path, or any spiritual path, is to have your mind softened and deepened.

There is an expression in one of our prayers, that one’s mind becomes ‘hard as horn.’ The minute I first read that particular phrase, it touched me deeply. Every time I have thought about it, it has meant more and more to me. One’s mind becomes hard as horn because of the discrimination, the conceptualization that is involved with the idea of ego, because of the pride and arrogance that arise from our belief in self-nature as being inherently real. We have established in our minds all of the clothing, the dogma, the discrimination of this idea of self as being real. These things become rigid in our minds, and our minds are no longer gentle.

The moment you decide in some subconscious way you have an ego, that you are a self, you have to start gathering the constructs of self-identity around you. You have to determine where self ends and other begins. In order to do that your mind has to be filled with conceptualization. In order to be a self you have to survive as a self.  In order to maintain this conceptualization that makes survival possible, your mind has to become rigid. So if I say to you that your mind is rigid, you shouldn’t think I have insulted you. I am talking about a condition all sentient beings have, and it is a condition that is the cause of a great deal of suffering.

When I say that all sentient beings are suffering, I don’t wish it to be a real downer for you. That is not the point. Realizing all sentient beings are suffering is meant to soften your mind, because to realize all sentient beings are suffering, you have to be willing to examine phenomena and to examine yourself in a deep way, in a way that you don’t normally do. Therefore, you have to challenge your concepts. Why is that? Because naturally, and without any teaching or any encouragement, you will try to convince yourself that you are happy.

You may do this in much the same way that a person who is hungry and unable to eat will do something to take his mind off his hunger. Let’s say its 10 o’clock. You’re on the job, you’re famished, and you know you can’t get off for lunch until 12 o’clock. You are going to try to think of something else. You’re going to try to keep your mind busy, or try not to focus on your hunger. In much the same way, if you are suffering and you don’t have the technology to remove from your mind the causes of this suffering, you are going to try to convince yourself that you are okay. You are going to put a band-aid on it, and in order for you to do so, your mind has to become more hardened.

It is useful to really look around at sentient beings and see they are suffering. It is also useful to look at yourself. This is not meant to make you depressed or sad. It is meant to give you what it takes to go to the next step, which is to try to determine for yourself the way to remove the causes of suffering.

Even though there are times when hunger is not comfortable, when you would rather not think about it, there are also times when hunger is useful in that it keeps you alive. In the same way, while it may be uncomfortable for you to think that all sentient beings are suffering, it is actually quite useful for you to realize that. It is this realization that will give you the foundation and the ability to turn your mind in such a way that you have to seek out the causes of suffering, and how you can remove them from your mind.

It is not useful in any long-term way to try to convince yourself, by putting a band-aid on an ulcer, that everything is okay, because you still have to face the same things that you’ve always had to face. Nothing has changed. You still have to face old age, sickness and death. Neither does it help you to be helpful to other sentient beings. Look at the animal realm. Go to India and see how the oxen are beaten and tied up in order to be worked. They are worked all of their lives. That is suffering. Look at all the different ways that other creatures suffer just out of ignorance, because they have no way to help themselves.

Once you have determined suffering does exist, there is no need to dwell on it in a morbid way. Rather, you should think, “This is how it is. Now I have to realize that there is, in fact, a cure, there is a way to deal with this.” It is not useful to dwell on suffering without also accepting the antidote. In other words, if you just think about hunger all the time, and you don’t eat, that is stupid. When hunger is no longer useful to you, it is simply suffering. You should use your awareness of suffering to prod you to seek and practice the antidote to suffering. Use your awareness; it is your tool.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

In Emptiness, Fullness

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In emptiness – fullness

In silence – song

In stillness – movement

Going, coming, sleeping, waking, empty, full

Speaking, listening, bitter and sweet

The same, in essence.

This much is known

And old truth and new

Kindness is the way

Love, the display

Meaning in method

A blessing for today

Let’s try it.

Let’s try it.

This way

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

A Constant Wish

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The kind of practice that results in supreme enlightenment is the continuous, natural, graceful effort.  It is a happy, blissful,and  joyful effort.  We should always be in the posture of the teachings.  That means that you literally walk around with your heart like a bowl, your mind like a bowl and you are in the posture of a constant wish:

“Please Lord Guru

Change me into whatever form is necessary.

Change my mind – Change my heart – Purify my karma.

Please Lord Guru

The only thing that I request that you do is to not let me remain the same.

Please Lord Guru

Constantly pour the nectar of your Dharma into me.

Lord Guru,

Do not abandon me in samsara.

Do not leave me in the condition that I am now.

Change me utterly and completely to where I do not recognize

Myself as an ordinary samsaric being any longer.

Think of the Guru like a mother bird.  Constantly remain in the posture of beseeching the Guru for teachings.

The thing that you have been terrified of, the thing that you have guarded

yourself against, is the very thing that you should be requesting constantly:

That you should be transformed and changed according to the wishes of the

Guru.

Do not let me be separate from your teachings even for a moment.

Have courage.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Rejoicing

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An excerpt from a teaching called Viewing the Guru:  The Seven Limb Puja by Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo on October 18, 1995

The next posture that we maintain constantly is that of rejoicing.  Constantly rejoice. This posture of rejoicing actually isn’t like, “Walk around being happy!”  That would be like putting on a false face.  You have all this samsaric past in you and yet you’re putting this happy face on it.   That’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about rejoicing in the accomplishments of the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas, of all those who have achieved realization.  We’re talking about rejoicing in the accomplishments of others.  In the face of the Guru, as the Guru’s child and inseparable from the Guru’s nature, instead we say, “Oh, this one has crossed the ocean of suffering,” and rejoice in the accomplishment of the Guru.  The accomplishment of the Guru reflects on one’s own karma, if you think about it. “I rejoice in the accomplishment of the Guru, and now I am in the presence of the Guru, and now the accomplishment of the Guru then becomes available to me, as well.”  How do you think the accomplishment of the Guru could ever become available to you if you do not rejoice in that respectfully, if you do not give rise to the recognition of the joy of that?  If you say, “Well, I wonder what she really has accomplished?  I mean, let’s think about it.  I mean she really doesn’t pay much attention to facts.  She doesn’t know any of those lists.”  You know  those lists that you all have to know? So you might be saying to yourself, “She doesn’t know any of those lists, so how good can she be?”  So that’s the kind of thought that you might have about your teacher, and maybe in this case you would be right.  But in this case you would be wrong for you, because it doesn’t help you to think like that!  If you find fault in the face of your Guru, you will never achieve realization.  Period.  That’s it.  If you don’t recognize the nature of the Guru, you cannot recognize your own nature.  It simply will not occur. So instead, we recognize the qualities of the Guru.  We see that this is the very extension of Guru Rinpoche’s miraculous compassion, that this is primordial empty nature and luminosity, non-dual, expressed in the world in a form that I can understand. This is beyond flaw.  Because that’s what it is.  It is not a human being.  It is not a samsaric being.  It is not a prop.  It is not a thing.  It is not ‘out there.’  It is the very display of our nature, in a form that we can recognize.  So we rejoice in that.

That’s how it’s relevant to our practice, but in general, rejoicing in the welfare of those who have accomplished Dharma includes rejoicing in the Buddhas who have crossed the ocean of suffering and returned for the sake of sentient beings: rejoicing in the Bodhisattvas who hold back from the brink of nirvana for the sake of sentient beings; rejoicing even in practitioners who have accomplished, who are now accomplishing, Dharma in order to benefit sentient beings.  When you hear that one of your peers has completed Ngondro or completed some other practice, or had a really profound relationship with their practice or they are really going into it and they are really moving on it, the faulty human tendency would be to say, “Well, I could do that.”  Or,  “Well, yeah, but they’re not taking out the garbage!  I mean, they’re practicing all day, but you never see them take out the garbage.”  That’s the kind of tendency that we have.

Instead, we are talking about constantly rejoicing in the achievements of others.  That is a way to increase your own accomplishment as well.  But in terms of practicing with the Guru, you should think that, in fact, we are looking at the face of primordial nature, we are looking at the nature of emptiness, at the display of luminosity. The Guru appears in the world, and we are rejoicing in the accomplishment of the Guru, rejoicing in the magical, mystical and miraculous appearance in the world, for the sake of sentient beings.  We are constantly rejoicing in that to where there is no room for grasping and clinging and judging and all those things that we normally do.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Wandering in a Circus of Appearances

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

To develop spiritual recognition, you need to recognize that beings that you see living in a material way that seems so fruitless have the very seed of Buddha Enlightenment within them.  They are That Nature, but piteously confined; blind, wandering in this deluded world of appearances, simply dancing through reactiveness.  Without that spiritual discrimination, there’s no practice.

If we can begin to really push ourselves to give rise to a state of recognition by applying this discrimination and mindfulness, then perhaps we are actually practicing, actually accomplishing something.  It is entirely possible to spend one’s whole life calling ourselves a “renunciate,” dressed up like Dharma, walking around with beads, but if we do not require of ourselves that we move further and further into giving rise to a state of recognition, we might as well be entertaining ourselves.  The very thing we wish to disengage, that deluded ego, that inherent belief in self-nature, is on center stage.  So long as that is happening, we are suffering; we are wandering aimlessly in samsara with no way to understand our Nature: blind, deaf, dumb, unable, mistaking the five primordial wisdoms for our senses.  Our senses that tell us if things are hot or cold, big or small, so we can have them.  Our senses that tell us if things are far away or close by so we know whether to react with repulsion or attraction.  Our senses describe that stuff ‘out there’ so we can determine how we should feel about it.  This deluded and continuous reality that we steep ourselves in is not practice, even if you do it with the robes on; even if you do it with your beads in your hands.  It is awakening to the state of recognition that is most important.

When we see deluded sentient beings, this is an opportunity.  They become to us like gurus.  This is an opportunity to practice.  Have you seen your parents? Though I’m sure they’re dear to you, they’re not really enlightened people.  They’re not like living Buddhas.  We’ve watched our parents age and sometimes very painfully – the aging process is not a comfortable process.  Your body drops out from under you and starts betraying you. Not only have we watched this process go on, but we’ve watched them suffer so much.  We’ve watched them try to attain, one by one, all the goals they were told to obtain and work so hard.

Sentient beings aren’t lazy. Sentient beings are working very hard every day to fulfill their belief systems.  Our parents went to work.  They might have been the worst parents in the world, but they went to work every day.  They worked really hard. Maybe my parents were some of the worst in the world, but I did watch them suffer, suffer, suffer and work, work, work and beat themselves to death.  And the grief that they feel when they look at what they’ve been doing and working so hard for, and it amounts to nothing. What happened?  Now I’m old, nearly dead.  This is not only true with our parents; it’s also true with us.  It’s true with all beings.  These are not bad people; these are not evil people.  The sickness here is ignorance.  The sickness here is a state of non-recognition.  The sickness here is the narcotic sleep called samsara.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Giving Rise to Recognition

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

Do you want to be powerful like all Americans want to be?  Do you really want to be potent?  Do you really want to be a Great Being?  Well, if you want to do that, then stop seating your ego on the throne.  Awaken.  Get the fact that you are impotent unless you are able to move into a state of recognition.  You are impotent if you do not recognize that all the things you call your life are merely symptoms of the condition of your mindstream.  You are impotent if you do not realize that every time we have an opportunity to practice discrimination and lift up the sacred, we have an opportunity to awaken within ourselves; we have an opportunity to practice recognition, and that is power.

The way most of us live is like we’re trying to get through a dark room.  It’s pitch black.  There’s all kinds of stuff in it: furniture, sinks, bath tubs, all the stuff that they have in rooms.  We’re trying to get from the birth door to the death door.  We’re going across this room.  Now, you have two choices.  You can either go through this room and stumble over everything that’s in your way, or you can turn on the light and recognize what’s there, move around it, move over it, your choice.  But, that state of recognition requires constant mindfulness: constant mindfulness of that which is sacred, distinguishing that in the world.

I’ve given this again and again and again, and I will never stop because I love this so much.  It’s a line from a song that Art Garfunkel had in one of his albums. I think the name of the song is Mary Was An Only Child, and this one line that describes exactly what I’m talking about is perfect, another way in which the Guru speaks.  It goes like this:

“And if you watch the stars at night

and you find them shining equally bright,

you might have seen Jesus and not have known what you saw.

Who would notice a gem in a five-and-dime store?”

That five-and-dime store is ordinary perception.  To notice the diamond, we have to give rise to recognition and the View.  I feel that to practice like that is really a natural empowerment, a natural medicine that helps us give rise to the wisdom that is inherently ours.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

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