Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

The Origin of Suffering

October 30, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Eight-fold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I have known of cases, it is very rare, and beautiful to behold of people who have gone through terrible terrible suffering and have used that as a way to become strong. In fact there are entire cultures of people who through tremendous need to survive and tremendous suffering, have found some way to become strong through that suffering rather than to let that suffering take them down. But that’s very rare. Most people react to suffering as though something outside had occurred to them, and they were merely standing there. They don’t understand the relationship of cause and effect, and how karma prevails, and always is exacting. If you give rise to any cause, that very effect will occur. We don’t realize that, and so we react in an odd way.

What causes our reaction is our deep attachment and desire for things to be as we wish. For instance, if we have to live on beans and rice all week because we don’t have enough money for steak and potatoes, we might think, “Oh this is terrible suffering. This is just so terrible. But then another person might say, “I really dig beans and rice. Take the Beano and you’ll be fine. What’s the problem?” I’m being funny now, but you get what I’m saying. It’s really your reaction. One person can have some catastrophe happen to them, and they will use that almost as a guru to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get stronger. But most of us don’t. We react because we don’t have our heart’s desire. So, if we lose a relationship that is very dear to us, a death happens or loss of friendship or loss of love, when we really look from a practical sense at what changes in our lives as a result of the loss of this person, most of it is manageable usually.

What’s really terrible is our own pain. Our own pain is caused by our attachment to that person and our desire to be with that person. Attachment to a person or a desire to be with a person is not necessarily a bad or unethical thing, but understood within the context of the Buddha dharma, we must understand that too much attachment and not enough unconditional positive regard for all sentient beings – placing all of our hopes and desires on one person or maybe a small family – means that our suffering will be very great at the time of losing that relationship. We know that whatever comes together must also separate. Whether it is in life or in death, nothing remains and everything is impermanent.

It is our reaction that causes us to suffer. One person can lose a job or a position and totally flip out, and ruin the rest of his life simply by the thoughts and activities that he takes while he is not stable or in good shape. Then another person can take a challenge like that, examine himself, and say, “What’s going on here? Maybe I should change this or that about myself?” There are many ways to react, and what the Buddha has taught is that the suffering is caused by desire and attachment and the purpose of practicing the Buddha dharma is to pacify and lessen that desire and attachment. Another way to put it is to see through its narcotic effect. We want what we want. It stimulates us and makes us happy. Then we want more. But if we really examine the desire and attachment, we’ll find out that most of what we cling to is relatively unimportant and in the end, will bring us suffering because we are too attached to it. So, the Buddha taught that the origin of suffering is attachment and desire.

Back to Basics

October 29, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called the Eight-fold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Recently it has come to me very strongly that if we lose sight or connection with the very foundations of the path of Buddha dharma, we tend to lose our way eventually. There are well-documented, well-preserved teachings that Lord Buddha gave that are very pristine and very concise. They concern the first turning of the wheel of Dharma. This is what Lord Buddha taught during the time of his life. As the Dharma grew and spread, there were other developments within the Dharma. So, there are basically three levels of the Buddha dharma. One is called the Theravadan point of view, the original teachings that Lord Buddha himself taught. There is the Mahayana point of view, the accomplishment of the original teachings, and the addition of the idea of wisdom and compassion – primarily the idea of the Bodhisattva vow – this was all taught by highly realized Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Then there is Vajrayana, which is what we actually practice, and which has a lot of ritual to it. A lot depends on the inner rather than the outer display. It is powerful yet subtle. There is technology that goes with it, and as one accomplishes the technology, one begins to advance and change and move ever closer toward awakening.

We should never consider the first level of Buddhism to be somehow lesser. Instead we should think of the first level of Buddhism as the absolutely necessary foundation. If you don’t accomplish and don’t understand what Buddha originally taught, then there is no real understanding later on. I would consider it to be something like building a house. If you are building a house you don’t want to build it on a sandy beach where it slopes down to the sea and the waves are big. You want to build it on a very firm foundation. You want to pour your concrete slab, and make it really secure. When you are practicing the path of the Buddha dharma, it is very good to understand these primary teachings. To understand their meaning to the degree that as you move further on the path, you can always reflect back on the original teachings to give you context, strength, and inspiration. It is necessary to understand exactly what did the Buddha taught.

When we talk about the Buddha teaching, we say, “turning the wheel, an expression meaning, “give the dharma.” The symbol of dharma is a ship’s steering wheel, an eight-spoke wheel, and it symbolizes the eight-fold path. “Turning the wheel” is a symbolic way of saying, “teaching the eight-fold path.”

When the Buddha first turned the wheel, he taught the four noble truths. The Buddha himself was considered peerless, fully awakened, fully developed. Having experienced all of the content of samsara and nirvana, through his realization, and in his awakened state he was able to take all that he saw, and make it concise, something very understandable. Small in words, but big in meaning. This is what the Buddha taught. You can’t argue with it.

He first taught that in samsara or in life, suffering is all-pervasive, meaning that life is suffering. We don’t like to think of it that way. We prefer to think that we’re happy, and we try to coax ourselves into a happy mood. Still if we look around we see that there is suffering wherever we look. The human suffering is old age, sickness, and death. I’ve experienced two out of three, and I know I’ve done the other one but it is hard to remember. We all know that this is true. Human beings suffer from old age, sickness, and death. You can try to think positively about it, but we all know that when it gets down to it, when you’re sick, you feel rotten, and if you are critically ill, it is so much worse. It’s horrible to have your own body betray you. If you get to the point where you are experiencing old age, we can look at Madonna, and we can look at all the different wonderful people who have kept in shape and all, and we think, “Oh, its not so bad.” Its bad! Getting old is bad. For those of you who don’t believe and are too young to know, it’s bad. And that is the suffering of the human realm.

Each different realm has its own form of suffering. For instance, animals suffer from fear and stupidity. An elephant is much stronger than its trainer, and much stronger than the means usually used to contain them, but they don’t know that. Elephants are very smart in their own way, but in that particular way, they are not so smart. In India you see bullocks pulling carts and what not, and their whole life is just toil and work. They experience the whip if they don’t do it. That stupidity keeps them there. I mean, they could basically turn around and knock the driver senseless if they so chose. They are powerful animals but they don’t know that. And so that’s the suffering of the animal kingdom. That and fear since in the animal kingdom you are either prey or predator. And even predator can be prey sometimes. So fear is rampant.

The Buddha taught that everywhere you look, suffering is all-pervasive. That no matter what a person’s life looks like, there is suffering. And then he taught the cause of suffering is attachment or desire.

When we come from a materialistic society and an ordinary world, we think to ourselves, “How can that be? Suffering is when you don’t have enough money. Suffering is when you get hit by a car. Suffering is when your beloved child grows up and does drugs or something.” We can name all of these sufferings that happen to us, and so it is hard for us to understand how desire or attachment can actually be the cause of suffering. The way it is explained is that while things do happen and they are caused by our karma, the cause and effect relationships that we have given rise to in the past, and we see our karma ripening as events that seem to happen to us. What really makes us suffer is our reaction.

What’s Your Goal?

October 28, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Ask yourself again and again, “What’s the goal here?” If you are more interested in expressing your fundamental, uncontrived, primordial nature which is free of discrimination, free of that which is complete and that which has just begun, in a joyful, symphonic musical way with wings? If you are more interested in giving flight to what is precious than in following a dogma or a religion or playing church, then you are going to be an excellent practitioner.

On the other hand, if you are interested in playing church and you have a time clock for this and it’s just a thing that you want to do, part of your life, then that will be the result. If you practice religion only to make your life different, then you will have a different life, but if you practice wisdom and Bodhicitta in order to awaken, if you recognize everything as inseparable from you, if you are able to move into the posture of moving through the sacred as that which you are, as something precious, then I think you’ve got a shot at it.

That’s going to take you working at it and you’ve really got to determine this for yourself. You have to build the marriage inside of you. Don’t make the mistake that we make in ordinary marriages, waiting for the romance, hoping that the path will somehow woo you so that you can feel good about the path. That’s not going to work. It’s a lot deeper than that.

What I’m suggesting is that you really take this into your heart, really consider this, turn the page on a new kind of life. You can start today. Supposing you were never to take another bite of food into your mouth without offering the nourishment of that for the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings and giving thanks and realizing the divine, precious inseparable nature of that food. Supposing taste for you became more like chameleon than yum, yum. Think about that.

Supposing love and friendship became for you a holy sacrament rather than a way to fill your time. Supposing the spiritual life became for you an expression of something that exists and fills your heart, rather than something that you’re doing in order to look a certain way. You know you want this. You know you want to feel it to the depth of your heart.

Why won’t you be your own best friend? Take yourself by the hand and give birth to a truly spiritual life. I don’t care if you call it Buddhism. I do care that you practice compassion and Bodhicitta. I do care that you awaken to the primordial wisdom nature. I do care that you begin to understand the sublime nature and emptiness of self and all phenomena. This I care about very much, but what you call it is up to you. Call it love. It’s about really going for it, really taking it in until it’s yours and bonding with it.

Practicing the path the way we’ve practiced it is kind of like having a baby and putting it up for adoption and checking in on it every once in a while and expecting to have the same kind of bonding and connection that you do with a child that you nursed with your own body and gave your own milk to and formed that kind of unbreakable connection with. What a difference.

Don’t make spirituality in your life the bastard child. Let it be your life. Let you be that. And of course you are. You are the ground, the basis, the primordial wisdom nature. You are the movement and display, which is also called method, and you are the result. And it only seems like we’re on the path now because it seems like we are traveling toward the result, but in fact nothing is going anywhere. You are not moving. Nothing is far away from you and there is nothing to uncover or to build or to establish. It is simply the precious awakening, and to truly live a spiritual life you must understand that this is your nature.

Transform your life into the sacred, the sacrament, the beauty that you long for as though it were an external thing, and I’m asking you to do it by 1 o’clock. The reason why I’m naming this time is because it’s so simple. It’s just as simple as what you’re doing now. In fact, it’s much more simple, because what you’re doing now is feeling separate from the source, separate from your path, neurotic and needy. And by 1 o’clock you could have that all fixed.

Express Your Nature

October 27, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I’ll tell you something about myself which may sound odd, being as I’m sitting on this throne in the middle of this Buddhist mandala here. I’m not a religious person. I do not like spiritual dogma! I do not like religion as I see it practiced. I wish that I had a more comfortable seat, but I have connection with this particular method and so that’s the display or form that it takes, but the underlying reality, the thing that wrenches my heart, and makes everything about my life without choice, is that I know no other way to live other than to see my life as an expression of my Nature.

I have watched myself throughout the course of my life. I have made choices that are so difficult, but they were never about the spiritual. I have moved on and I have left things and I have walked into things and I have done all kinds of stuff, but when it comes to the spiritual unfolding in my life, there has never been a choice about that. In any event in my life, if I have had to choose continuing on with the expression of my Nature, this spiritual clay that is unfolding here, or engaging in some ordinary activity, which would not facilitate that sacred life, there has never been a choice. I will always choose the sacred.

It’s not that I’m patting myself on the back, it’s just the way it is. I never have chosen and I think it’s because I’m not religious or dogmatic. I don’t see religion as separate from me. I don’t see dogma as something I have to pick up and carry around. I see my life as being innately spiritual and I see that there is no other way for me to express myself.

For each one of you I make the same recommendation, that you each find a way to experience that kind of intimacy with your spiritual life, to realize that you’re not doing anything or anybody a favor. You are simply expressing what is true. To try to find a way to understand that the ground or basis and the movement or method and the fruit or result are simply three faces of the same reality, and that reality is you. There is nothing that you are doing here that is strange or exotic or unusual. You are expressing your nature. What else would you do? Not express your nature?

Each one of us has to find a way to really get that for ourselves. That’s your challenge, isn’t it? Haven’t you as you’ve matured throughout the course of your life, as an older person or middle-aged person and, however old you are, haven’t you looked back at earlier times in your life and realized that you didn’t know how to really engage, that you were kind of absent, that there is a certain kind of absenteeism that we practice with when we are less mature in our lives. Do you remember what it was like to be 15 to 18? You haven’t yet grown a brain. And later on with maturity you realize, “Whoa! I’m in my life!” Later on it happens spiritually and it’s even more profound on a spiritual level.

When you’re a young practitioner you realized that in a somewhat unconscious way that you were simply trying to do what this Lama tells you and trying to do what the Buddha says. You were just doing stuff. But then, later on as you mature on the path, you begin to realize that there is something here that is like the amplification of your own voice or the rays of your own sun or some movement that is a natural display of your own nature. You realize that there is a connectedness about the way that you lived. You begin to move into the maturity of that.

On the path that is really necessary for us. It requires that each one of us take responsibility in an individual way, not relying on the structure of the temple for this one to come to you; not relying on the capacity of the teacher to empower, deepen and ripen our minds; not relying on the Sangha to support you and give you that shot in the arm that we need all the time. In the same way that you do when it comes time for you to marry on an ordinary level, you find what in you connects with that. You begin to understand the union of this, begin to find how it is that you are a spiritual being and how it is that the path has appeared. You begin to take responsibility for this connection, for this marriedness and it is not about vows and commitments to something outside. It’s about walking in a sacred life as a person fully endowed with the natural capacity, the method and the potency of result in order to attain Buddhahood.

Think Before You Leap

October 26, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

For those of us practicing the Buddha Dharma, there is the tendency to act and practice like new practitioners. When I say new practitioners, I don’t mean practitioners that have been practicing for only a week or six months or two years. We act like a culture of new practitioners, which we are. The Buddha Dharma has only recently been introduced into our culture. Our culture is more determined by Judeo-Christian thought than it is by Eastern thought and so many elements of our culture do not comfortably embrace the way the path is taught, including our language, and most especially the way that we live – our life style. We are in a culture that is materialistic and extremely competitive. These two ideas of competition and materialism are taught to us as virtues from childhood and so “collecting things” or “going somewhere” are very pivotal ways of viewing our progress through life. For those of us on the path, that becomes somewhat difficult, and we have to translate what is basically innate Eastern thought into a western context or culture. I think that I am good at that because I was born an American and I think that’s helpful, if one has some understanding of the path.

Our problem as we face either beginning on the path of Buddhadharma or continuing on the path, is the sense that the path has to become really married or bonded with the way that we utilize our mind and our perception. We have not really been able to do this yet, even if we’ve been practicing for some time, even if we are wearing the robes, even if we have a daily practice that we are extremely committed to. It tends to be the case that we don’t actually bond or marry with the path in a way that is truly intimate and lasting. Unfortunately, we tend to externalize the path.

What are the reasons for that and how does it manifest? First of all, in our culture and way of thinking, we externalize everything. This is not unusual. Everything that we see is a road in front of us. Of course this isn’t only typical of our culture. It’s typical of the way that human beings perceive things altogether, but particularly in this culture we think of things that must be accomplished and things that must be collected. We find ourselves facing something that is in front of us, a path that is in front of us. And although the teaching of the BuddhaDharma is extraordinarily different from spiritual and esoteric philosophy as we understand it in this Judeo-Christian society, we are not able to make that transition. We practice Buddhism like Christians, which is really not how Buddhism ought to be practiced at all.

If we understand the source of our misunderstanding and how it is that we externalize the path, we can begin to repair the damage and begin to rethink and reassess. The great thing about us is that we can learn. We are that particular unusual kind of computer, which can learn from its own programming, reassess and reevaluate. We are capable of that. If you watch us in our lives, you’d never know it, but we are capable of learning.

If you are practicing a method that did not arise from the mind of the Buddha, from supreme enlightenment, you are not practicing a path that can also result in supreme enlightenment, because the seed and the fruit have to match. An asparagus plant will not produce an apple. They have to match. It’s one of those fundamental, commonsensical, “2 + 2 = 4” kinds of reality that we like to conveniently leave out on a regular basis.

Why do we do that? Is it because we have a particular shtick that we need to fulfill about what religion is all about? Is it preconceived notions that we have? Yes, there are elements of that, that’s true, because we are intellectual people, we have formed ideas that are difficult to change once they are formed. We have the habit of clinging to ideas almost in the posture that if our ideas were to change, the result would be so mind-blowingly chaotic that surely we would die. We have this habit of wrapping ourselves around our ideas in a very firm way. Flexibility, of course, is an unheard-of skill.

That’s certainly one reason why it is difficult for us to think logically about the path. Another reason why it is so difficult is that, if you really examine us, we have very little familiarity with, or habits geared towards, really thinking something through, from cause to result, in any area of our lives. We like to take these flying leaps at reality. We like to take these great plunges thinking, “I want that and I’m here, so jump!” It’s that kind of thinking. Just jump! And jump again! But heaven forbid, don’t stop and think what cause would produce that result. We don’t have that habit.

We spend a good deal of our lives incapacitated in certain ways because each one of us has a particular problem to deal with. Some of us may have confused mental states. Some of us may have really strange habitual tendencies that produce unhappiness for us again and again. Many of us engage in patterns that we just can’t seem to shake and they always produce for us these habits that make us unhappy. When we make ourselves unhappy, we withdraw from that unhappiness and we whine and we blame the faith and we blame the people next to us. We take these flying leaps at our lives without really thinking through any kind of cause and effect relationship.

We have been given definite teachings on what kind of virtue and activities produce happiness, but we don’t want to practice virtue. We want to take flying leaps. We’re used to it and we don’t want to change. Regarding the path, it’s the same way. We see the path as being in front of us. It has certain characteristics, and so we see ourselves as separate from that and we take a flying leap in that general direction, without thinking out what is original cause, what is the basis, what is the method. What is the result, and how to really reason that through. We don’t seem to be able to do that. We seem to like to take these flying leaps.

Oddly enough, we expect that these dramatic, utterly unfounded and ungrounded flying leaps are going to make us happy. So we spend most of our lives just thrashing and flailing around.

In most regards, we don’t have the habit to understand the relationship between cause and result. It’s a particular kind of delusion that seems to go hand-in-glove with our human reality. When it comes time for us to really become intimate with and marry into the path, we look around for some way to do that, and the difficulty is obvious.

For many of us who have been practicing for some time, when we engage in the path we will try to make the path its own satisfaction. If we understood the basis for the path, and what the fundamental underlying ground of the path actually is, and what the result of practicing the path in a certain way will be—not because it’s magic, not because the signs point in that direction, not because of superstition, but because ground and result cannot be separated—we would begin to understand that in fact, under those conditions, the path disappears.

The path as a separate entity then doesn’t exist, not in the way that we understand it. It becomes inseparable from our own primordial wisdom nature, our own Buddhahood in its causative, seed form, and it becomes completely inseparable from the full-blown result of Buddhahood, actual awakening. If you understood this, you would not be engaged in thinking, the way we do now, “Okay, today I’m really going to get into my practice. So instead of doing an hour of practice I’m going to do two hours.” What kind of thinking is that? I mean, yeah, at some point you might have to decide how much time you have to put into it, but that’s not what it’s about. That’s not going to make a bit of difference if that’s the approach.

The kind of thinking that we have now also is “I’ve been out of it with my practice and so now I have to get back into my practice.” Even that kind of thinking is deluded thinking. To get back into your practice means that you’ve walked away from something that is infinitely connected, completely inseparable from that which is your nature. You can’t walk away from that. No matter where you go, there it is.

The Three Faces of the Path

October 25, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

When we think of the path, we think of something that is external, separate from us, something in front of us that we have to move towards or attain. A different understanding of the path might be that the path is something that actually engages with what you might call three faces. But these three faces are very much like us. You could say that each one of us has at least three faces. Each one of has the face of anger or discontentment, the face of joy, and the face of balance or contentment. There are many different faces that we have.

The path also has faces and when we truly study them we can understand what the nature of the path actually is. You could say that the path exists as part of a three-part system and if you were to think of the path itself in a true and more profound way than we normally think, you would understand that there is no way to tell where the path begins and where the path ends. We would understand that comprising what we call the path are three faces which are (1), the ground or basis from which the path arises, (2) the path or movement itself, the display of that source or fundamental nature from which the path arises, and (3) the fruit, which is the direct result of that fundamental nature as well as the direct result of the activity of that fundamental nature.

These three things, the ground, the path and the fruit or result cannot be separated in any way, shape, manner or form. The moment that we begin to separate these three aspects, we have lost touch with what the path actually is. We have lost touch with an intuitive understanding of how to practice the path, and we experience a great deal of delusion concerning the path when we separate ourselves from the understanding of the threefold face of the path: the basis or ground; the movement or path itself; and the result of the path.

Without this understanding, anything that we do becomes a path. Any activity that we engage in becomes a method. That method connects something with something or it wouldn’t be a method. But on the path of Buddha Dharma we have to remain connected with the ground, the method, and the result. These three have to be considered as threefold.

How is it that we can use this understanding to determine the validity of the path and to remove from ourselves the tendency toward delusion? First of all there is the teaching on the relationship of the seed and the fruit. There is that kind of good old-fashioned, common-sense wisdom that if you really want to have an apple tree in your orchard, you’ve got to plant an apple seed, that if you wanted an apple tree in your orchard and were to plant cabbages, it simply would not work. You would have cabbages, not apples. If you wished for some apples and you were to plant asparagus, that’s not going to turn out really well for you unless you really determine that asparagus is your thing. I know it sounds like I’m being silly and belaboring this point. The moment we get it, I’m going to stop nagging about it, because as yet we haven’t got this one and it’s really, really important.

The Buddha Dharma is not a path or a method that arises in any common or ordinary way in the world. In other words, someone didn’t get born at some time and simply compose a path. A team of experts or technicians didn’t get together and engineer a path. NASA didn’t design this one. This path was not a dream or a vision that someone had about twenty years ago that remains unproven or insubstantial.

The path of Buddha Dharma as we know it only arises when the condition of the Buddha nature appears. It arises from the mind of enlightenment – the Buddha nature. Lord Buddha did not begin to teach the path, although he had attained varying degrees of what you might call cosmic consciousness or something like that, before he actually attained supreme enlightenment. He had various degrees of consciousness that he could communicate and various qualities that he could teach to others—teachings on compassion, Bodhicitta, practicing meditation—but in fact he did not teach until he awakened into the primordial nature that was his true nature, Buddhahood. And then at that time he was able to display the path or method to the world.

The path or method actually came forth from his realization. It did not come forth even one millisecond before his realization. Once he achieved that precious awakening, he was able to bring the path to the world. During the course of Lord Buddha’s life he discovered that there were many different displays of consciousness, many different levels of attainment and attunement that one could accomplish and he did accomplish many of these before that ultimate moment. But it was that ultimate awakening that he presented to the world as the Buddha Dharma.

The seed of the method that we practice is enlightenment, the Buddha nature itself. It is not the human nature. If it were the human nature he would have taught before that precious awakening and that would have been something from the human capacity. But it was not until supreme realization that he began to teach the method and he taught only that method which leads to supreme enlightenment. So the seed and the method are completely married and not separable.

Bliss Happens

October 24, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Awakening from Non-Recognition by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

There are so many amazing ways that you can practice. I’ve seen it again and again in the greatest practitioners, but only in the greatest, so we aspire to this. I think about stories I’ve heard about the Tibetan Bodhisattvas. For instance, during the tragedy when Tibet fell, literally 20,000 Tibetans (my teachers among them) tried to cross the Himalayas to get to India to safety, and only 20 arrived. These people endured incredible amounts of death, killing, all kinds of terrible sufferings. And then you think about great Lamas like His Holiness the Dalai Lama and my teachers who have said that instead of hating the Chinese who caused them so much loss and so much suffering, they feel almost worshipful in a sense, recognizing that the Chinese are their gurus. Now how does that happen? Are you thinking, “Well, this is maybe more than I can swallow? You know, if anybody is going to destroy me and my culture, I think I’d rather not like them, thank you very much!”

What has happened here is that these great Bodhisattvas recognize that everything is the mandala of the guru. With faith, everything is the display of the guru. So this tragic event is understood as a wrathful display that gives us the opportunity to cut off ego clinging at the root. Whatever they decided to do with this information, Tibet fell. Those things happened, so you basically have two ways to go with this. You can use this as an excuse to fall deeper and deeper into samsara with hatred and prejudice, or you can use it as a ladder to climb out of samsara through practicing renunciation and the cessation of ego clinging. It’s already happened. Those are the only two choices you have! Now, if we were a good practitioner and broke a leg, we’d say, “This is truly the display of the mandala of the guru. This is the guru’s blessing because now I can’t hop around the way I normally do. I have to sit my butt down and pray.” You can use that opportunity or you can sit that same butt down in front of the TV and watch soap operas all day long and wail and gnash your teeth about it.

In my situation I think like this. Many of you know I came from an alcoholic and abusive home. To me that is my most precious gift, my most precious empowerment. I have received until this date no more precious empowerment than that. It’s not to say I want to do it over again. It was a nightmare. It was horrible. The days of suffering were endless, but I understand what I could not have understood any other way: that samsara is something to be reckoned with, that all sentient beings are suffering, that I wish to see suffering end. I don’t think I could ever have understood this as well if I had not experienced what I experienced. So that has become my empowerment, and I feel that this is the guru’s blessing. Hopefully, I have come to a point in my practice where I can say this without resentment. I feel that I can look to the face of my guru and say, “Thank you for this skillful means that you have offered me so that I will benefit sentient beings. Thank you for this.” Without resentment I can truly say that. In the next breath I’m also likely to say, “Please let’s not do this again by the way, if you don’t mind.” But the recognition is there. So it has become for me an empowerment.

The bottom line message of Guru Yoga isn’t about subservience or about losing power or losing strength. If anything, it’s about recognizing that the ball is in your court. You have and will have the experiences of samsara. What are you going to do about that? Even if you lay down and die, you still have to go through the bardo and then you do it all over again.

You have choices, but they’re not the kind you’d like to have. You’d like to choose to be either here or not be here, choose to be happy or be sad, choose to have one experience or another happen to you. What you can choose is what you do with what happens to you. If you were to enter into the practice of Guru Yoga deeply and be truly empowered by that, this entire life could be an empowerment. We can transform all of the whining and moping and gnashing of teeth that we do into strength.

Often students will come to me and say, “I have this particular problem. This particular problem makes me unusual and unfit. My mind is stuck on it. So let’s make a big deal about my particular problem so that we can talk about it together and then we don’t have to practice. We can just have this particular problem.” Well, my answer to that is great, because if you have that particular problem, when you solve that problem, you’re going to have that particular strength. That’s what you’re going to have. This is golden. This is gravy. So we take this problem and we transform adversity into bliss, and the bliss occurs when we move into a state of recognition. We understand that we are not victims anymore. We understand that this kind of dualistic thinking is unreasonable and unwarranted and pointless, and we begin to understand “I am here. I am that. And the capacity to display this nature is something holy, a gem, a jewel that I possess.”

We learn this within the context of Guru Yoga, through the friendship of our teacher, through recognizing what is not ordinary. But try to remember, if we insist on maintaining the same habitual tendency and interact with that which is holy as though it were ordinary, and are not able to make that bridge or that transformation, it’s like taking a precious jewel—the most precious in the world, in all worlds, that could buy you anything that you want, a wish-fulfilling jewel—and making, as a six-year-old would make, a play pretty out of it.

It’s not that one way of being would make you a bad person and the other not. It’s that one is a terrible tragedy, a terrible waste, a terrible loss, and the other is empowerment. That’s the difference.

As we hold in our mind the intention to awaken as the Buddha is awake, as we hold in our minds the information about the difference between what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, as we begin to move into a state of recognition through the practice of Guru Yoga, this will facilitate every happiness, every result of the path. Gradually, over time, we will prepare for the opportunity of recognition, and it will occur. This is the truth. I would not lie to you. I have no reason to lie to you. These are the Buddha’s teachings. Again you have the opportunity to pit your ordinary process of conceptualization, as it arises from samsaric tendencies and samsaric means, against what the Buddha speaks, which is the truth of your own nature. This the Buddha has taught, “I will appear as your root teacher.” This Guru Rinpoche has taught, again, “I will appear as your root teacher.”

Perhaps this teaching will give you some beginning understanding of how to approach the practice of Guru Yoga. I hope that it is helpful to you, and I hope that it helps you to move across certain stuck places that we as practitioners find ourselves arriving at again and again. Thank you very much.

The Student-Teacher Relationship

October 23, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Awakening from Non-Recognition by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

This relationship between the student and teacher absolutely depends on the connection between what appears to be two things. On the part of the teacher, the relationship requires the capability to express, display and communicate Dharma, and certainly the intention of Bodhicitta first and foremost. The student’s well-being and realization, recognition, awakening, enlightenment is the goal of the relationship. The teacher’s responsibility is to connect with the student in order to bring about that result and to provide all of the necessary components on the path in order to achieve that result.

What is the student’s responsibility? The student’s responsibility is not to treat this relationship as an ordinary thing, once you have determined that it is not of the world. That would be inappropriate. Have you ever seen children make collages? They take a piece of construction paper and they glue pretty sparkled things on that piece of paper and then they give it to mom. They just make a play-pretty. That’s their artistic endeavor because they can paste and glue. You don’t think students do that with their teacher? The equivalent would be to take a most precious jewel, like the Hope Diamond, exquisitely precious, immeasurable in worldly and monetary terms, put some Elmer’s glue on it and stick it on a piece of paper right next to all the fuzzy things and play-pretties and sparkles and colored macaronis and all the things kids use to make collages, and say “Because I can paste and glue. Because I’m six years old now and I can do this.” That would be the equivalent. You would take that precious jewel and paste it on that piece of paper and just throw it around with the other things you make because you can, because you’re smart, because you’re human, because you’re American. Can you see what I’m saying here?

This precious relationship should not be dealt with in that way. It’s absurd. You cringe when you think of a diamond—that’s worth so much money that it could probably feed all the homeless in our entire country for at least a period of time—used as a play thing, pasted on construction paper with colored macaroni and stuff. It’s exactly the equivalent of practicing Guru Yoga in the way that we practice it.

That precious relationship provides a format in which we practice recognizing. When we are born in samsara we have a certain experience. As a human being we are born of a mother and a father. You can’t get away from that. As far as I know, no one has just appeared somewhere. If you have, please tell me. I want to see that you’re missing a belly button. We pass through the birth canal and we experience the world as infants and then we grow into consciousness. There seems to be this continuum that expresses itself in time. Why does that happen? Well, it’s because we believe self-nature to be inherently real. Self-nature is not the same as the Buddha nature. It has a certain kind of limitation, and the format seems to be that it moves through space. It takes place in space. To take place in space you need to take place in time also. So we have this experience and we take it for granted. That’s simply the way it is.

The Buddha is able to look at you and see everything about you, every single condition that brought you to this present moment. What kind of perception is that? When the Buddha looks at this experience, the Buddha sees in awareness, in the awakened state. In that recognition there is something else. There is an appearance of this nature in a display form, like the sun’s rays coming from the sun. The Buddha understands this nature and does not distinguish between this and that, between empty and full, between high and low, between hot and cold, between solid and non-solid. The Buddha recognizes that face, that nature, that ground-of-being simply in emanation form.

When we meet with our teacher, there is a different relationship, and this is how we have to understand the necessity and power of Guru Yoga. If you have chosen your teacher correctly, the teacher is a Bodhisattva with enough wisdom, enough awareness, and enough accomplishment in meditation so that there is recognition, so that the teacher knows your nature. The teacher recognizes this potential, this seed, and the teacher/student relationship is completely based on that recognition. Even though the teacher may occasionally interface with a student in a way that appears to be ordinary, it’s always about bringing the relationship full circle until the student’s recognition occurs. That is the basis of the relationship. Don’t make it ordinary. It’s not about a warm fuzzy. It’s not about being comfy cozy. It’s not about feeling good. It’s not about whether we both like to ice skate or have the same color skin. It’s not about any of that.

It’s about the appearance and the recognition of that appearance. The student has an incredible opportunity and that is to begin to practice entering into a state of recognition, utilizing the Guru Yoga, utilizing the teacher. Why should we utilize the teacher rather than sit down and chant “Om” and just meditate and see if we can recognize our natural state? Well, because it’s not likely to happen that way, that’s why.

We are ordinary sentient beings lost in samsara. We have been conceptualizing self-nature since time out of mind. We have unbelievably strong habitual tendencies. If you think addiction is strong, as it appears in the world now with drugs and alcohol, it’s nothing compared to the level of addiction to a habitual tendency that we have in our clinging to ego as being inherently real. It doesn’t even come close!

In this relationship we are going to conceive of something different. We are going to determine what is ordinary and what is extraordinary. We are going to go through this whole process we’ve outlined. We determine that this relationship is extraordinary. It arises from the Buddha nature. It results in the Buddha nature. In the middle is the path or the method. This being the case, we begin to understand that if this relationship arises from the Buddha nature and it is the Buddha nature and that is our nature, when we see the teacher, we have at last seen our own face. That precious moment—when that face that is our nature arises in some way that we can recognize—is the beginning of recognition.

Now it seems external. It seems like the teacher is out there. It is the student’s responsibility to practice in such a way that they begin to recognize this appearance as the most precious, holy experience. It’s not like worshiping a statue. It’s not like that. It’s recognition of the nature. What is the nature? It is the Buddha nature, indistinguishable from our own nature, therefore the recognition of our true face.

We talk about how to see our teacher when we meet him or her for the first time during the day. There are practices and beautiful writings—I myself have even written things about this and spoken about this, but it’s not my particular talent. In our heart without pride, with surrender, with beauty, with gentleness, with regard, without rigidity, without ideas, without taking that jewel and putting it on that collage, on that piece of paper, we behold the teacher and we say, “This is my heart, my mind, my breath. All that is precious and holy to me, all that is beautiful in this world.” And we place the teacher in our practice above the crown of our head. Are we stupid people worshiping something else? Are we kind of limp or weird? Are we maybe not American anymore? Try to understand. This is not about a personality cult. This is not about putting one being or body or personality above any other. It’s not like that. This is about recognition. The same pride, confusion and preconceived ideas that cause us to say, “Well, I just don’t know. This person is just an ordinary person and maybe I should just be friendly and try to do some practice and some reading.” That kind of holding oneself back from recognition is the exact same holding oneself back from recognition that is occurring right now to you and causes you to remain suffering in samsara. If you insist upon putting the teacher in the ordinary category, you insist upon putting the nature in an ordinary category. It’s the same problem, the same habit, the same disease.

Your Chance at Recognition

October 22, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Awakening from Non-Recognition by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Guru Yoga must be seen not as an end but as a means to an end. Quite frankly, speaking for myself and I’m sure most other teachers, we could care less. I’ve described this many times before. I just hate the whole prostration thing. It takes me forever to get through a room. If one practices in a profound way, these prostrations are an opportunity, and that’s why I allow them to be practiced here in the same way that they are practiced generally in our tradition. Otherwise I wouldn’t, because they bother me, but I allow them because it is an opportunity to make an offering and to move immediately—body, speech and mind—into a posture of recognition. You are speaking, “I take refuge in the Lama. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.” You are engaging in conduct with your body. You are engaging in intention with your mind. With body, speech and mind you are connecting to recognition, and that’s why I allow it.

The relationship with one’s teacher is utilized as the water of life or some sort of ultimate nectar or ultimate empowerment that provides a way for us to begin to recognize that which is holy arises in the world and that each of us is that. Each one of us should practice like that. To the degree that we hold the teacher above the crown of our head and then take the teacher into our hearts, without finding reasons not to—because those reasons not to are the very reasons we are using to remain lost in samsara—to that degree we learn to recognize. Yes, we know you’re clever enough to find reasons not to recognize the nature. If you need to be clever in the way Americans need to be clever in this day and age, you are already clever, very good, now let’s move on. Let’s see if you can learn recognition.

The relationship with the teacher then becomes this precious opportunity, this precious bridge. We see that the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha and, all three-in-one as the Lama have appeared in the world, and we see that this is not separate from us. So in the beginning we start practicing by contemplating the difference between what is ordinary and what is extraordinary. We begin to move into relationship with the teacher. We begin to practice devotion. We try to practice some pure view, understanding that this is the appearance in the world and that this is holy and we let it be that way. We simply let it be. Then gradually we move into a much deeper practice where we understand everything is the mandala of the guru. In that practice we begin to learn to turn adversity into bliss.

Life on the Merry-Go-Round

October 21, 2016October 20, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Awakening from Non-Recognition by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

According to the Buddha’s teachings and according to everything that we can surmise from the information we receive as we travel along the path, we as sentient beings, are in a state of non-recognition. When you hear a term like “non-recognition,” it’s hard to really understand what it means. When we think of the word “recognizing,” we think in superficial terms such as “I recognize you” or “you recognize me.” We recognize people with whom we are familiar.

That concept still holds true, but there needs to be a deeper, more able way to understand what non-recognition means. According to Buddhist philosophy, we contain within us the seed that is the Buddha nature. It is not smaller than the Buddha’s nature. It is not bigger than the Buddha’s nature. It is not different from the Buddha’s nature. It is the same. It is that nature inherent within us that is the primordial wisdom state or the natural ground-of-being that is our nature. As we move toward enlightenment, we don’t construct that nature. It doesn’t become complete. It doesn’t become bigger. It simply is what it is, but we move from a state of non-recognition into a state that the Buddha clearly described as being awake. And that’s the only difference.

In our culture we tend to think in a materialistic way even about things that are very subtle, very pure, very profound and very spiritual. We tend to think that perhaps the Buddha or a great Bodhisattva or even one’s teacher has a bigger Buddha nature than we do. Somehow their Buddha nature is bigger and maybe more muscle-bound, more fit or stronger than ours. At the risk of being crude, we wonder if the teacher’s isn’t bigger than ours. According to the Buddha’s teaching, that is not the case. The simple difference is recognition. One Buddha nature is not different from another.

As ordinary sentient beings we are locked in the state of non-recognition, and that non-recognition is so all-pervasive that it becomes invisible. It’s like being born on a merry-go-round. If no one ever stops the merry-go-round and you spend your whole life on the merry-go-round, you will never know that you’re on it. You will never know anything other than that reality. Our condition of non-recognition is very much like that. It has always been this way. We project everything outward onto a screen. We know no other way to be aware. So that is the dilemma of sentient beings. We wish to awaken as the Buddha is awake. We wish to come to understand our true nature, our primordial wisdom nature, which is the ground-of-being, and yet we are locked in a state of non-recognition.