Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Eyes Wide Open

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

You may ask, “Why do I have to think about suffering? Why is it that the Buddha talks about suffering and nobody else does? Why is it that today’s New Age thinkers are saying, ‘I want to be me. I want to be free,’ and the Buddha is still talking about suffering after thousands and thousands of years?” It is because the Buddha has a teaching that is very logical and very real.

If we want to exit a room, but there is a chair between us and the door, we have a number of choices. We can say that the chair is not there. We can pretend that the chair is not an obstacle to our passing through the room and that it’s not important. Or we can notice that the chair is there and get on with our journey by walking around it. That is the essence of the Buddha’s teaching. The Buddha doesn’t stop at saying, “There is suffering.” The Buddha follows that by saying, “There is a way out of suffering.”  And that’s the ticket.  You cannot motivate yourself to follow the path out of suffering until you generate the commitment through the realization of suffering. You can’t make yourself walk around the chair to get to the door until you face the fact that the chair is blocking your way. You have to look at the chair.

It isn’t only about walking around a chair so that you can get to the other side of the room, so that you can get out the door. There’s more to it than that. You must understand that your commitment is two-fold. In order to become the deepened practitioner that you must be, to really sink your teeth into the Buddhadharma, you must have compassion for others that is so strong and so extraordinary it will nourish you even when you are dry.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Compassion – The Foundation of the Path

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

In a superficial way the idea of compassion can seem very simple, and we might make the mistake of thinking that we understand it. But if we study compassion deeply, eventually we will come to understand that the ultimate view of compassion is enlightenment itself. It is the natural, primordial wisdom state itself. That’s why compassion isn’t truly known until we reach supreme enlightenment.

Compassion is the foundation of the Buddhist path. Without it, like any house that does not have a firm foundation, the house will crumble. It will not stand. One’s motivation to practice must be compassion. If your motivation is not compassion, it will be very difficult to firmly stick to the commitment to practice and meditate every day. I feel for those who say, “I’d really like to practice. I would really like to have a time in my life everyday to meditate, and yet I don’t have the discipline. I don’t have the strength. I don’t have the commitment.”  If you have the right motivation, if you want to do this solely and purely from the point of view of compassion, you will find the time and you will find the commitment and you will find a way to do it. For those who have tried to meditate everyday or be consistent in their practice, if they can’t do it, my feeling is somehow the foundation of compassion isn’t strong enough.

If we could make the idea of compassion so strong that it becomes a burning fire consuming our hearts, until we are nothing but a flame. If the need to benefit others becomes so strong that it’s irresistible. If the understanding that others are suffering so unbearably in realms that we cannot even see, let alone the realms we can, that we cannot rest until we find a way to be of some lasting benefit to them. If these things can truly become part of our minds, we will find the strength to practice.

How do you find the strength to breathe? “Well,” you say, “that’s easy. Breathing is a reflex. I have to breathe. If I don’t breathe, I die.” What if you could cultivate the understanding that all sentient beings are filled with suffering that is inconceivable in its magnitude and that there are non-physical realms of existence we are not even aware of, filled with suffering? What if you could cultivate this understanding so deeply that, because of your realization, compassion and profound generosity became as much a reflex as breathing?  That is possible.

“Well,” you say, “I don’t have that kind of understanding. I’m just not like that. I can’t make myself really buy into that.” Let me comfort you with this awareness. Unless you are supremely enlightened you are not born with that perfect understanding. No one is. No one is born with enough understanding of the suffering of others, and an affinity with the idea of compassion, to create that perfect discipline naturally. That understanding comes only through its cultivation, and we must cultivate that understanding consistently every day.

Cultivate Selfless Compassion

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

It’s almost impossible to attain the goal of selfless compassion, where you commit every fiber of your being to benefiting all sentient beings, seen and unseen, without a moment’s hesitation. It’s almost impossible to develop the kind of compassion where you understand that all sentient beings are revolving helplessly in such suffering that they can’t bear it, and you can’t bear to think it’s going on, without cultivating a deep understanding of suffering. You want to avoid the trap of making the very same prayers that the selfishly motivated person might do, but instead have the idea that you want to be a great Bodhisattva.

One goal will produce lasting results and the other will not. The person with the motivation of selflessness has the key. Through extraordinary, selfless compassion, that person has the strength to persevere through everything until he or she is awake. That person will persevere until he or she has completely purged from his or her mind even the smallest, gossamer thin seeds of hatred, greed and ignorance. The person whose motivation is to be the ‘good person’ will not be able to do the same for any length of time. The foundation isn’t strong enough. That person may need some kind of feedback, or warm fuzzies as reward for being good. Even tried and true Buddhists will find this impure motivation in your minds. Even our ordained Sangha will find that they, themselves, will have dry periods. You’ll go spiritually dry, bone dry, and you’ll think, “What am I doing here? I can’t go on; it’s just too hard.” Then the next day, you’ll wake up and you’ll think, “Another day…good.” You’ll have all these different feelings that are just so common. Everybody, everybody has them. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to have these feelings.

Why does it flip flop back and forth? Because you have not built the firm foundation of very pure, selfless compassion. You need to cultivate it every single moment. You need to get yourself past the point where you need warm fuzzies to keep you going. If you are only looking at the symptom of suffering and trying to manipulate your environment to turn suffering around, you will always need feedback. That feedback may or may not come. Your compassion, your love should not depend on that.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Everything Counts

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From The Spiritual Path:  A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

No two people experience anything exactly alike, ever. It’s almost as if we see through different-colored glasses. Even the same person can experience the same event quite differently on different days. Something that bugs the potatoes out of you one day will roll right off your back the next. This is due to the ripening of your karma at the time. It ripens in slightly different ways at every moment, creating a different inner experience. A tapestry is being woven, interdependently arising. Your mind is not the same today as it was yesterday, because different karma has ripened. The threads of the tapestry are different, but your ego-clinging makes it seem the same.

Some indigenous peoples do not use the word “karma” but acknowledge that if you take something from Mother Earth, you must return something. For instance, American Indians believe that you may cut down a tree because you need the wood, provided you repay or replenish the earth. If you don’t, there is a hole that nature or Mother Earth must fill. Additionally, the imbalance you cause in the environment will be played out somehow in your life—in mind or in body, but especially in your spirit.

This idea is very similar to the concept of karma. Had we grown up with the belief that cause and effect cannot be altered, that this is a universal law that, whether we are caught or not, there will sooner or later be a payback for every situation—we would have an entirely different culture. We would not have damaged the ecological system, while disregarding the consequences. Though concern is growing, we still abuse the environment and our natural wealth. We constantly make deals promoting personal gain. This is not wrong unless we take from others with no regard for their welfare. But we applaud business deals that benefit us and hurt others. Getting ahead is the American way. “That’s politics,” or “That’s business,” we say. We have learned to condone selfishness, totally disregarding its impact on our minds.

As we “learn” that for some things there is no payback, a poison gradually infiltrates our mindstreams. Many powerful people profess traditional religious beliefs yet complacently engage in graft, bribery, obstruction of justice, embezzlement, and lying. Believe me, if the first people to cut down a rain forest (or to bring a species close to extinction) had been struck by lightning, there would be no ecological problem today. If the earth had opened up and swallowed the owners and operators, there would be no problem with strip mining. But the payback is often slow in coming. We remain unskilled in connecting causes with their inexorable effects.

Suppose you go to a party at someone’s house and see some perfume samples. You think: “They have lots of these, so I’ll just take one. It’s no big deal. Surely if I asked, they would give it to me.” Later you go to a grocery store and think: “Gee, I’d really like one of those cookies. Just one, because if I buy the whole pack, I might get fat.” Then you notice a pack that is broken open. “Well,” you think, “it’s already open, so I’ll just slip one little cookie out. The store can’t sell them now, anyway. They have a budget to cover that.” Even if no one misses the perfume or the cookie, you have changed in your mindstream. The change is subtle. But you have changed. And if you continue to act that way, your mind will become hard. It must—because something inside of you knows what is right and what is wrong. Something inside you is very moral. There is a sensitivity to things balancing out. It may not be the part that you can listen to, but karma, the potential for karma, the reality of karma, the interaction of karma—exists in the mindstream of every sentient being.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Generating the Deity

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Chenrezig

From The Spiritual Path:  A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

As you generate yourself as a Buddha or Bodhisattva, reciting mantras and devotional prayers, your mind arises as a pure form. This is different from the ordinary mind that struggles to wake up each morning, dragging along its ego-clinging baggage or karma and looking for happiness in futile ways. This pure form is an expression of pure cognition, free of conceptualization and limitation. It is pure awareness, a state of pure luminosity. The deity we generate is an expression of that pure state. All phenomena are understood to be the deity’s body, voice, and activity. Thus, phenomena cease being something we grasp.

Generation-stage and completion-stage practice disassemble the entire time-and-space grid, disassemble the moment itself. You dissolve into emptiness and purify all things into their natural state. Thus, the mind relaxes from the tension that is gathered around “I,” and it becomes possible to reconstruct the moment naturally through the creation of the mandala and through allowing the mind to arise as the deity. This great skill is accomplished when the entire process becomes effortless.

“How,” you may ask, “can it be effortless? The mandala, the whole process, seems very complicated.” Actually, it is less complicated than what you are currently perceiving. You have a mandala going right now. Look around you. You sit on a world that sits in a galaxy that sits in a universe, and it is all lit up. How do you ever manage to conceive it? And on top of that, you pay your electric bill, call people on the phone, feed your pets and yourself. You enter a metal thing that flies through the air from one place to another. It is an extremely complicated mandala. In addition, you are constantly moving through a chain of lives in six major realms in a completely un-predictable pattern.

The generation of the deity is far easier. It is natural and spontaneous because it is not built on the assumption of ego. It is not constructed of tension because the deity is understood to be real but insubstantial. It is understood to be that which does not need to be constantly maintained. The tension of survival associated with desire and egocentricity is not there. With the continuation of this practice and the skill developed through good concentration and an effortless effort, all perception is purified. The five senses are not given their lead. They are not permitted to feed back information that satisfies the need of self to be self. They are purified by the mind naturally arising as the deity. The karma of endless cycles of birth and death is purified at last.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Coming Home

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From The Spiritual Path:  A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Many people don’t like to be challenged. We want our religion to fit nicely into our lives. No untrimmed edges, everything nice. Don’t rock the boat. We want our practice to be conventional—and convenient. But do not expect “nice” in your relationship with your Root Guru. Hope and pray that you get ripped open and rearranged. It should sometimes feel like a train is running over your head. The door opens from the inside. Open the door of your mind, the door of your heart, the door of your devotion. Deepen. To the extent you can allow that to happen, accomplishment occurs.

The Lama should change your life. If you do not wish to change, you are in the wrong religion. So far, what you have given rise to in this life is samsaric, and you must break its hold. You wish to attain realization.  Think of yourself as a Volkswagen entering a repair shop. Somehow, you’re supposed to emerge as something that can circle the earth flying. Isn’t that quite a change? But you have to be hungry for it. You have to let it happen. It’s called surrender. And it’s total or nothing.

The Lama should interfere with you. This is also unpleasant news for Westerners. We have convenient, reassuring rules about who can solve our problems, who has access to our lives: parents, psychologists, lawyers, accountants, lovers, family, and so on. But what I’m saying is that you should pray for the Lama to come and upset your life. Expect to have holes poked in it. Expect it to change.

Why should the Lama have the ability to enter your life? What we see, what looks like a person, is only a display. If you are letting a person into your life, you are not practicing Guru Yoga. You should not let an “ordinary” person into your life. But when you understand the nature of the Lama, you realize the Lama to be the condensed essence of all the objects of refuge. The very fabric, the nature of the Lama arises from the mind of Enlightenment. When you practice Guru Yoga, you must also understand that the Lama is none other than your own true face, the nectar of your realization. The Lama is the precious awakening. So you are inviting the precious reality of awakening, the Precious Buddha Nature, that Nature which is beyond acceptance and rejection. You are inviting that nectar to fill your cup.

How many minutes a day should you spend in devotional yoga to the Guru? Can there be too many? Might you go crazy? No. If you spend every waking and sleeping moment with the Lama enthroned upon the lotus of your heart or seated above the crown of your head with your heart and mind in the posture of adoration, love, longing, taking refuge, calm abiding—it is not too much. This is because you are relying on something that is not of the world. It is not samsaric.

You should try to develop a personal relationship with the Guru, but not with his or her personality. Whenever you see or experience something good or beautiful, offer it to the Lama for the sake of sentient beings. “May all sentient beings come to know the nourishment of finding and experiencing complete non-duality with the Guru.” Not only do you include the Lama in every aspect of your life; you dedicate that practice so others will find their teacher. In that way, your connection with your teacher becomes strengthened.

The Lama should be part of everything, everything. You should always follow your Teacher’s instruction, always rely on his/her guidance. When you receive a beautiful gift, mentally offer it to the Lama for the sake of sentient beings. “By the merit of this offering, may all sentient beings be drawn to the Lama’s presence and see the Lama as the ultimate refuge.” Offer the food that you eat: “May all sentient beings feast on the great compassionate intention of the Guru.” As you do this, your food becomes a ritual substance that awakens the Bodhicitta that brings you closer to enlightenment. It becomes holy stuff. It becomes part of your life in the most profound and amazing sense. Guru Yoga becomes the most precious jewel in your life. Everything becomes joyful. Everything becomes a big YES, a big outward-moving experience. There is a lack of contraction in your psychology. And on a deeper level, everything in samsara is transformed into the path. This practice, I can tell you from my heart, is a feedback loop. It is never an energy that merely goes out. It comes back a million fold. The more you become absorbed in your Guru Yoga practice, the happier, the more nourished you will be. The feeling is that of strength, of calm, of coming home.

From the depth of my heart I pray, gathering together whatever virtue I have accumulated, in the three times. This I offer to the Supreme Lord, Guru Padmasambava. May you all, every sentient being, attain the bliss of non-duality, and joyfully awaken to see the true face, the Great Lord of Light, the Root Guru. Lord Guru, rest upon the lotus of our hearts, that we may at last know happiness.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Pitfalls and Excuses

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seed2

From The Spiritual Path:  A Collection of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

It is difficult in our world to practice regularly, with firm resolve. Some people say, “I’d really like to do that, but I don’t have the discipline, the commitment.” But if you are motivated by compassion, you will find the time and the way to do it. What if you are just too tired? Well, how do you find the strength to breathe when you are totally exhausted? You do it automatically, don’t you? What if you could understand, through a process of deep cultivation, that innumerable sentient beings are constantly in pain, that they go through endless rounds of torment, that there are non- physical realms of existence filled with unimaginable suffering? What if, because of this realization, compassion and profound generosity became so much a part of you that they were an automatic reflex, like breathing? Then there would not be a moment in which you did not practice with the utmost compassion. You would never think only of yourself and your needs, pursuing temporary gratification.

In order to become a deepened practitioner, you must have compassion for all others—so strong, so extraordinary that it will nourish you even when you feel “dry.” Unfortunately, some people practice for years, perhaps taking both retreat and ordination; then, suddenly, some karmic switch flips in their minds. They decide not to “do” Dharma anymore. They move on to other things. This is not uncommon for Westerners. It need not happen to you, but you should face the fact that it could. You could become dry inside. If so, you must face the cause: You have forgotten them.

If an extraordinary, burning love is not the most important force in your life, the natural inclination of a mind still influenced by desire will be to reassert itself at some point. This sounds harsh, but it is true. This is a time of increasing degeneracy. You must practice and cultivate this mind of love so thoroughly that you are moved to the core even at the faint possibility of achieving liberation in order to benefit beings. Do not be afraid of that kind of love. In the West, we learn to be cool, rational and detached. We value this highly. When we go to the grave, however, only the selfishness of this ideal will survive, not the intelligence. What will also survive and create the circumstances of your next lifeis the purity of your mind and heart, the degree of love you have accomplished. And if your love is so strong that you return even after attaining liberation, you are the hope of the world.

If you have the love to make a commitment to benefit beings at any cost, a sense of joy is born in the mind. This joy is stronger than ordinary human joy. It begins as a tiny seed but eventually grows to become a profound sense of bliss.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Facing Reality

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The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Bringing Virtue into Life”

Why is it we’re not facing that?  Because of the very nature of samsara.  It is like drinking alcohol.  It is like taking a narcotic.  There is something about the way we perceive in samsara.  There is something about the way we register data that causes us to not see time passing, to remain fixated on a certain internal idea and not really taking into account what is actually happening.  We learn instead to accommodate ourselves.  We start dying our hair.  We put on more makeup than we did 10 years ago.  What else do we do?  If we are men, women are not the only ones who dye their hair.  This I have found out!  This is the truth!  Women are not the only ones that are doing it.  Men are doing it too, or they use that, what is that stuff that you comb in and it takes, Grecian formula.  Yeah.  Some men use the Grecian formula.

Then others of us, we have different ways of not dealing with reality.  You know, you get to be maybe 45, 50 years old and you realize that you can’t do what you did before.  You just cannot.  You don’t do it.  You don’t want to do what you did before, but you simply cannot.  Physically you cannot do what you did before and so the way you deal with that, instead of really dealing with that and really looking at that, is you sort of change your life style and you think, “What I’d really like now is a change of life style where coincidentally I am slower.  I don’t have to walk or run as fast.  I coincidentally would like to have a house with less stairs.  I coincidentally would like to have clothes that are a little looser on me than they used to be.”

Some of us, the men for instance, when they are younger what they really want most in this world is motorcycles.  You want a motorcycle so bad you can taste it!  You’d do anything for a motorcycle or maybe a new guitar or fast car or whatever it is that young men really want.  Then when we get older we don’t face the fact that we’re older, but suddenly we want a town and country car, the kind that has a special kind of seat for lower back pain.  Then we get one of those beaded things you put on the seat for hemoroids.  It’s all right, because nothing has really changed.  I’m still a good looking man.  You know, that’s the way we think.  We’re just missing something here.  We are not facing reality.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Examining the Waterfall

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The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Bringing Virtue Into Life”

My experience has been that here in the west, when students come to Dharma, when they embrace Dharma and even when they’ve been practicing Dharma for a long time, they have the attitude that we, as people, are going to that church or that temple which is out there somewhere. It’s an incorrect attitude that bears examining.   We go there and we act in a certain way according to the beliefs of that church or that temple, and then we go home and we continue on with our lives as though our lives have not been changed, as though nothing has been heard at this church or temple that is relevant to our lives.  We don’t even realize that we’ve done that, but it’s such a deep prejudice that each of us has—this idea that one’s spiritual life or one’s religious life is somehow separate from the rest of one’s life.  For westerners it is a deep prejudice to the point where it is almost invisible.  It is so much a part of us that it has become, in a sense, part of our background, part of the landscape within our minds.  It’s hard for us, at least, to pick this out and say “Look at that.  I act this way when I’m around the temple and I’m thinking about Dharma and I’m thinking about the Buddha’s teachings. Specifically when I’m doing particular Dharma practice, I act this way.  Then I go home and I proceed as though I had never heard of it.”

We don’t even realize to what extent we do that.  Oh, it’s not to say that we don’t hear anything and we don’t try to do anything with our practice.  For instance, if a teacher were to say to us “All right, now I’ve given you this empowerment.”  And often when a teacher gives empowerment,  the teacher will say “Now I’ve given you this empowerment, I need something from you in exchange. And what I need from you in exchange is the commitment to good moral conduct,” let’s say.  Or “What I need from you in exchange is the commitment to never kill or harm another living being.”  So when we have a directive like that we can fixate on that.  We can put that in our pocket.  That’s a direct order.  We can hear that.  That’s something we can carry around and it’s easy.

Maybe we go home and maybe we don’t kill anything anymore.  Maybe we do things like, instead of getting out the old fly swatter, we capture the flies and we take them outside. So that’s our big effort as a Buddhist.  The flies are thrilled.  But the rest of what the teacher taught—those thoughts that should gentle the mind and turn the mind toward Dharma, that should make us see more clearly, that should make us live better and in a higher way, a more responsible way—these things we often miss.  These things we don’t carry home with us.

A good “for instance” is the idea that samsara, or the cycle of death and rebirth, is tricky, seductive, that it is a narcotic, that samsaric living deludes us into a feeling of safety.  In fact, our lives are samsaric lives. Since we have been born, they are involved in the cycle of birth and death. Our lives, in fact, according to the Dharma teaching, pass as quickly as a waterfall rushing down a mountain.  This is an excellent example.  This is something that every teacher will teach you the first time they see you; and they will teach you every time they see you until the last time they see you.  In one form or another, you will hear this same teaching and these are some of the thoughts that we are taught that turn our mind toward Dharma.  That’s an interesting thought, and actually that’s a very interesting image.  It’s a perfect image, in fact, by which this teaching can be taught. The reason why is that when you look at a waterfall rushing down a mountain, you might see a waterfall that has been rushing down a mountain for hundreds of years, thousands of years.  You could go to someplace where there is a very high mountain.  Perhaps there’s been a waterfall there for a thousand years and you might think to yourself “My life is going to be as fast as a waterfall rushing down a mountain.  Good deal.” Except that’s not how it’s meant, you see, because what the Buddha is talking about is that, if you took one cup of water and dropped it from the top of the waterfall, it would be down at the bottom of the waterfall in a flash.  You couldn’t even follow it with your eyes, it would happen so fast, and that is how fast our lives pass.

Now when we are looking at our lives, we look at them the way we look at a waterfall going down a mountain.  We don’t see the cup of water.  We don’t think like that.  We don’t want to think like that!  Who wants to think like that?!  We see the waterfall as being something stable, so this analogy becomes perfect.  When we look at our lives, the evidence is clear. I don’t know about you, but I don’t look the same way as I did ten years ago.  Do you?  Even if you are 20, ten years ago you were ten.  You still don’t look the same way as you did ten years ago.  When you are 45, you know you don’t look the same way as you did when you were 35.  So the evidence is clear and you see it every morning.  You see it every morning when you brush your teeth or you do your hair or shave, or whatever it is that you do.  You know about it.  In fact, you’re playing this little game with yourself.  I know because we all play this little game.  Trust me on this.  Especially the women can really identify this.  We play this little game with ourselves.  We’re not graying because we can go to the hairdresser and he will fix it.  Every now and then we get really brave when the guy is up there fooling with our hair and putting the glop on.  We say, “O.K., how bad is it?  How gray am I?”  And I don’t know about your hairdresser, but my hairdresser takes my hand and lovingly speaks to me and says “You will never be gray.  I will help.”  So the delusion goes on.  See?  It simply goes on, and we’re not facing it.  We’re not facing the fact that this thing that we are most afraid of is actually happening.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

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