The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Guru Yoga”
What makes Guru Rinpoche’s teaching, his path, different from others, different from other activities that we could do in our lives? Well, if we want to attain wisdom, why don’t we just go get a card in the library? Why don’t we just read everything there is to read? Why don’t we just go through every book in the world? Would we become wise then? Not necessarily, even from an ordinary point of view, because we would not have done anything about dispelling the fixation on phenomenal existence. We would not have done anything about dispelling the fixation on self-nature as being inherently real. We would do nothing about the delusion within our mindstreams. We would simply have accumulated information. I know lots of people that are smart, but not too wise from a Buddhist point of view. That is because the things that you can read from the library, the things that you can do in the world, arise from ordinary circumstances. They are compiled, or made up, of ordinary things. They can be collected. They are things in phenomenal existence.
What comes from Guru Rinpoche does not come from an ordinary place. What we receive from Guru Rinpoche in terms of teaching and blessing actually arises from the state of enlightenment. It therefore has an extraordinary source. And you always get apple trees from apple seeds. If what he offers arises from the mind of enlightenment, then it will result in enlightenment. It will bring about enlightenment. It has the capacity to do so.
There’s no way you can get that blessing other than through extraordinary means. You can’t pay money to get it. You can’t pay someone else to help you get it. You can’t take a pill to get it. You can’t eat the right foods to get it. You can’t work for 40 hours a week for so many years in order to get it. You can’t collect it. And so we practice Guru Yoga in order to increase our faith and our certainty and our confidence in order to receive the blessing that actually arises from enlightenment.
If we understand the nature of the Guru, if we understand the nature of Guru Rinpoche as being these profound things that I have described in brief, then we can understand that by practicing Guru Yoga, one can achieve extraordinary result that can be had through no other means. But in order to do so, one has to meditate and really concentrate on what that blessing is, how it arises, and what it comes from. One has to see the reality of Guru Rinpoche as being something more than superficial phenomenal appearance. One has to understand in a more deep and profound way.
So the blessing we receive from Guru Yoga then depends on us. How much time are we actually going to put into this consideration? And how are we going to view it? Are we going to continue to view Guru Rinpoche as somebody out there somewhere separate from ourselves who did something that affects us now? That’s a very limited, very superficial, very ordinary view and it won’t get us very far. We have to think about the nature of the Lama. We have to think that this phenomenal appearance of the Lama in physical existence is due to the miraculous extraordinary compassion that comes from a fully enlightened mind, that is inseparable from a fully enlightened mind. And we must understand that nature as being totally and completely realized, totally awake. We must understand it as being completely revealed in display form, emptiness and luminosity, emptiness and compassion. When we look at the Lama, when we see Guru Rinpoche, this is what we should understand.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved
