primordial wisdom | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Grasping for Happiness: The Root of Ignorance

June 27, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “The Foundation of Bodhicitta”

In closing, I wish to say this one thing. I talked to someone recently who was schooled in a meditation that could create a feeling that was kind of blissy. This kind of meditation had bliss-like qualities. It would make you feel that you were kind of drunk, a kind of high feeling, a bliss-like quality. When I asked where the teaching came from, she said she got it from her teacher who had an experience of revelation and developed this teaching from that experience. I asked what the source of revelation was. She said they don’t think of it as a source, but this person had a revelation. This person had developed a technique with breathing and things like that. When I heard what the technique was, I was amazed. I remember thinking that you can horse yourself into a hyper-excited emotional state that is very much like a blissy kind of an experience. You can jerk yourself around psychically, using breath, using visualization, using certain kinds of thoughts and physical and non-physical techniques in which you can feel a certain kind of bliss. But I don’t know why a person would want to waste their time with that. I don’t know why a person would engage in such activity. It seems to me that all they are doing is exchanging one kind of phenomena for another.

The feeling that you have right now is just that. It is a feeling. It is like dew on the grass. When you examine it and even understand that the self that produced the feeling is empty of self-nature and is only the primordial wisdom state, that feeling that you have right now will vaporize. And who is producing this bliss that you can horse yourself into? This bliss, when examined, is produced by that same one. Not understanding the emptiness of self nature, not understanding and awakening to the primordial wisdom state through purifying hatred, greed and ignorance, not understanding this, you can jerk yourself around and experience bliss. And you can think happy thoughts for an hour and you will feel pretty good about yourself; but who is producing that thought the same way and it will vaporize the same way. Why exchange one kind of phenomena for another?

In the Vajrayana view, it is very plain and actually best put in a very stark verbiage. In the Vajrayana view, it is very clear: Chocolate and shit are the same. They are both brown and they are both phenomena. Now, of course, it is the you that would rather it be chocolate, but the you is not inherently real as you understand it. It is empty of self-nature. And it is only in your understanding of yourself, in the way that you do understand, and your clinging to that self, that you crave chocolate as you do and you are repelled by shit.

But phenomena is phenomena and you must understand that in order to practice the ultimate bodhicitta, you must practice the supreme path that does not create just another kind of phenomena. It doesn’t just create another kind of high, but in fact absolutely pacifies, once and for all, all of the building blocks of cyclic existence, all of the grasping, hatred, greed and ignorance, pride, jealousy, all of these things, that will produce this terrible suffering. These must be pacified once and for all. That is the ultimate act of love. There is a technology by which this can be accomplished. You cannot think it away because always who is doing the thinking will be you.

So the game is then to become awake—to awaken to the primordial wisdom nature, to awaken to that Buddha nature, the ultimate kindness.

That is our teaching today. I hope that it is useful. Please make use of the teaching.

What Are Your Hopes?

February 12, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Mindfulness of Cyclic Existence”

Buddhist philosophy speaks of the emptiness, or the illusory quality, of all phenomena. If self does not exist in the way that we think it does and the only true reality is the primordial wisdom state, then phenomena cannot exist in the way we think it does either because all phenomena seem to us to be something external. That perception is born of the belief of self-nature as being separate. All phenomena are perceived as external, as inherently real. The only way that phenomena can be understood is by understanding that they are separate from self. Self ends here; other begins there. And really, that is how perception comes about if you look at the perception of your own mind. That is what your perception consists of. This is universally true. It doesn’t indicate that you are a good person or a bad person; it’s simply universally true.

Buddhist philosophy speaks of a natural awakened state, a state in which perception does not depend on division, but instead is a pure experience that is free of conceptualization, free of focus in the way that we have focus. It is a pristine and luminous state. And in that state, which, of course, is the goal in this philosophy, hope and fear have no place. Again, hope and fear are dependent upon the perception of phenomena as being separate. They are dependent on the belief of self-nature as being inherently real. In this system at least, the idea of hope and fear revolves by necessity around the idea that separation exists in such a form that self – you, I – can either have something or not have something, that happiness can be controlled by having or not having, that all the experiences that are uniquely human actually revolve around having or not having. If you think about all of the goals that we’ve had in our lives, all the things that we were taught by our parents and by our schools, they are all based on that dualistic perception. They are all wrapped around hope and fear.

This is a tremendous difficulty when one sets out to understand Buddhist philosophy. If you say to a Westerner, hope and fear are not so great, they only serve to make the mind unstable, the first thing that any red-blooded American will do is completely freak out. We do that because we were brought up with hope being a noble thing. I was born in 1949, and I remember some of the leftover consciousness that my parents had from the war—something inbred into the society or the culture at that time. Even though they were no longer directly involved in war, it was very noble to be very patriotic, to have a great deal of hope in the American way, to have a great deal of fear that the American way would be taken away. There was something from that time that I think has since been more firmly planted in our society than ever it was before, even though we were founded on revolution. Of course, there is hope and fear involved in that concept as well. At any rate, it becomes so important to us that even now in this New Age, this Aquarian Age, or whatever it is that we are in the middle of, even now a person is considered to be right-minded or to have the right attitude if no matter what life deals us, no matter what happens to us, no matter how we suffer or how sick we are or how miserable we are or how awful we feel, we rise anew every day refreshed and face the day, like a good American person. This kind of attitude is considered really, really admirable, really the way to go. In fact, it is considered that if one has this attitude that things will somehow work out. It’s not for me to judge whether that’s good or bad; I am only trying to isolate the idea so that we can look at it.

We also have the idea that we should have almost a priority list of things that we are hopeful about. Actually, in our society, if you were to walk up to an ordinary, mainstream moral majority person – now, perhaps meditators are a little bit different – but, if you walk up to any one of them and say, “What are your hopes? Come on, what are your hopes? This is America. What are your hopes?” they would give you a list of what their hopes are. If there is a person that you walk up to and say, “What are your hopes?” and they say, “Well, I’m okay. I am living from day to day. I try to remain in the moment, I try to experience each moment in its fullness, and I find that that’s enough for me. I find that if I remain mindful of the fullness of each moment and live right there and don’t really think too much about hope and fear, don’t really plan too much, but remain spontaneous…” In our culture, that person is a failure. That person is considered to be inappropriate. That person’s parents would probably not be too proud of them, and I find that in myself. When my children say I am doing just fine today and that’s all I want to think about, my American motherhood just goes “sssss.” Everything inside of me tenses up and wonders what is going to happen to my poor child. It’s so much a part of us. I am saying that we don’t even realize that.

How We See Enlightenment

February 9, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Guru Yoga”

If Guru Rinpoche is the Nirmanakaya form of the Buddha, we should also think that he is Enlightenment itself, that what we are seeing is merely the tip of the iceberg. It’s the way in which that function of enlightenment appears in the world. Is it always so? Does enlightenment appear in the world? Why does it? What is it when it appears in the world and what is it when it doesn’t appear in the world? What is it, actually?

Very hard to describe what enlightenment actually is. Because when we describe enlightenment, it’s like looking at the sky through a tiny peephole. You can’t really get what it is. You might be able to see the spaciousness of it. You might even be able to hook into a star. You might even be able to describe color and the way the star glimmers. But from looking through a peephole, you simply cannot understand what the sky is. It’s impossible. And from our point of view, it is impossible to understand what enlightenment is by looking as we do through our little peephole.

We can only understand enlightenment really in terms of what it is not. We can understand, for instance, that enlightenment is the state free of conceptualization. We can understand that it is a state free of contrivance. We can understand that it is a state unlimited by ordinary view, ordinary perception. But we can’t really understand what else there is. In fact if you described “some thing else,” you’ve lost the pristine nature of enlightenment, because if you do that, you are conceptualizing. You are limiting, and you are contriving, an image or an experience. That’s the way our minds work. That’s the only way that we have.

When the Buddha described himself, he described himself as being “awake”. Simply that. We can’t even understand what that means because we immediately want to say, “Awake to what? And what were you asleep in before?” We try to understand in those ways. It’s either/or, black or white. Our minds hook on to something. And for that reason, we cannot fully and completely understand enlightenment.

In short, enlightenment has been described as the primordial wisdom state, that state which is like luminosity. But it isn’t luminosity because when we think of luminosity, we think of light and light is “some thing.” This state called enlightenment is not a thing at all. It is beyond “thing-ness” and “no thing-ness.” It is beyond form and formless. It is beyond self and other. It is beyond up and down. It is beyond hot and cold. It is beyond dark and light.

Perception and Consciousness

January 9, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Perception”

Think of the experiences that constitute our lives and then single them out. For instance, we certainly have the experience of form, and we have the experience of that which is formless. We have the experience of touch. We have the experience of taste. We have the experience of hearing. We have the experience of sight. We have the experience of smell. We have the experience of consciousness. We have the experience of the perception that one computes, such as the perception of time and space, as well as the perception of sense, such as internal sense. We have the perception of immediacy and distance, on both an emotional and a physical level. We have many gross and subtle perceptual avenues. Perception of some kind is an experience that we live with constantly.

Each one of these experiences is extremely compelling. It is compelling beyond what can be easily described. What I mean by compelling is not in the gross sense that we think of, like, for instance, an alcoholic might be compelled to drink alcohol or a really thirsty person might be compelled to drink water. It isn’t that kind of compelling. It’s more subtle, but it’s extreme, it’s very strong. For instance, if I pick up this object I am compelled to compute it. I can’t not compute it. I have to compute it. I pick it up, and I immediately have the experience of how big it is, of how hard it is compared to my hand, of how hot or cold it is compared to my body, compared to my temperature, my own body temperature. The sense of color compared to what? Compared to my own color. All phenomena are relative to my perception of self. It’s extremely compelling. The moment I have this kind of contact I immediately compute it in this most compelling way, and I can’t help myself. I can’t come between myself and that computation. The inability to come between yourself and that computation is the lack of spaciousness that is the karma of our minds. There is no space. There is the immediate fixation, compulsive computation of the relativity factor, the relativity between self and other.

Now, when I have any kind of awareness, subtle or gross, when I have any sense of time and space -such as I have a sense of being in this chair, being so far from you, of being halfway through my talk, it’s nighttime, these things – this kind of perception is actually a conglomeration of many different factors that have come together. It takes a tremendous amount of computation to have this kind of perception. It’s tremendously complicated. Usually, all of the senses are used. The air feels different. Not only is it dark but things sound differently. Things happen differently at night; usually you don’t come here this way during the day. Many different things must take place to compose – and I mean the word “compose “– the experience that I’m having.

There’s also a general awareness of a process of distinction, or a process of differentiation, that constantly occurs. You could call that process, that awareness, consciousness. Consciousness, as we understand it, is a specific consciousness. This consciousness that we have is a very specific function. You cannot have consciousness without, on some level, computing relativity because consciousness is specific awareness. By the way, you really should not use the word consciousness when you talk about the nature of mind. That’s done commonly, and it really is not correct. You should not think you want to move into Buddha consciousness or that you want to have primordial consciousness. Consciousness is specific, and the state that we speak of when we speak of the primordial wisdom state or when we think of the Buddha nature or when we think of an awareness that is non-specific, is pure and undifferentiated. It is free from any such contrivance as specific “-ness”.

Even when you have experience in your meditation that feels like it’s very vast and you’re congratulating yourself on how vast that experience just was and you’re so impressed with the vastness of your experience and you think that you’ve surely attained cosmic consciousness or something like that, under those conditions – probably especially under those conditions – the consciousness is extremely specific and computes relativity. Consciousness means that I am conscious. I am having this experience. To be able to have this experience requires consciousness.

So what is this consciousness a function of? This consciousness is a function of the assumption of self. One cannot have consciousness, or taste, or feeling, or any kind of subtle or gross perception, without the assumption of self. The assumption of self comes first. The main thing that’s confusing about this point is that you want to know, well, who is having this assumption? Who is having this consciousness? Who is having this taste? I am. I am conscious. I have feeling.

Anybody want to test feeling? We’ll give them the old Ahkön Lhamo test for feeling. If you think that you are beyond feeling, I have a pin somewhere on my undergarment that I can take out very quickly and there you go! I will show you that you have feeling.

So what is your answer? Who has consciousness? Who’s conscious? Who’s having this feeling? Your answer has to be, although you’re terrified to say it: I am. You are, aren’t you? Can you doubt that? Can you say that you can’t see? Only if you close your eyes, but they have to be your eyes that you close. You are conscious.

The Emanation of Primordial Wisdom

May 26, 2016May 26, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is a teaching given live by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo at Kunzang Palyul Choling in Poolesville, Maryland on May 22, 2016

Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo gives a pith teaching on how Primordial Wisdom displays to us. She concludes with stories about the bear that’s tearing up the fence.

The Nature of Dreams

March 7, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is from a series of tweets by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in response to a question:

Questioner: What do you think dreams are? Are dreams a mirror of daily consciousness? Is there anything to do with them?

Jetsunma:

A great question! And more than one way to look at it. Physicists are beginning to recognize dreams as a glimpse into other probable realities that we are connected to. And that maybe these dimensions are all mind. They are getting close.

I say all realities are a Bardo in that we seem to be passing through them, and “Bardo” means passage. Dreams are as real as any other state, no more, no less. What you bring back from a dream may well be significant, in that on a subconscious level you want to remember it. That can be on the emotional level where we tend to sort out info and take what we need. Other dreams can be sorting info from the future, present and past. If we glimpse a future probability we might see it as prophetic. From the past? Some sort of processing. About the present, we puzzle and organize. And try to fill in the blank bits according to our preconceived notions. However, all concepts, waking or dreaming, are our fabrication of karma. We, the seer, the dreamer, the objects we “see,” the probable uncountable endless realities, the entire cosmos, inner and outer, are all empty of self nature! Like in quantum physics we are beginning to see that all is fundamental space, that even atoms and molecules are space! All inherently empty.

It is that trickster, the habitually confused ego, trying to run the show. So we cannot see the void ground of nature. The ego does not allow for that, as its purpose is opposed to the very idea. Ego argues with primordial emptiness. Yet without it there would be no dream. Just uncontrived unborn and yet spontaneously liberated space. It’s really not so scary. And quite relaxing to see all as impermanent and free.

The Nature of the Guru

May 25, 2011 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Guru Yoga”

According to the Buddha, the state that is the pure undefiled primordial wisdom state—this precious awakened state that is luminosity and emptiness inseparable from one another—is our true nature. But since time-out-of-mind, we have been involved in the incorrect assumption of self-nature as being inherently real. So due to our fixation on specific awareness and therefore our constantly defining and reestablishing the distinction between self and other, and the resultant attraction and repulsion that we are constantly involved in, we have never tasted this nature. We don’t know it.

It isn’t that it’s far away. It isn’t that we don’t have it yet. It isn’t that we have to grow it. It isn’t like that. That nature is right now! It’s right here. It isn’t anywhere else; it isn’t far away. And yet it is beyond here and now, beyond here and there. Due to our fixation on self-nature as being inherently real, due to the delusion of division within our mindstreams, we cannot taste that nature. We are involved in the process of fixation, and that nature which is all pervasive is not understood.

Guru Rinpoche is that nature. In his Dharmakaya form, he is displayed as Lord Buddha Amitabha—the Absolute Nature, free of any contrivance, free of any distinction, that nature which is emptiness. In his Sambhogakaya form, he is considered to be Chenrezig, that Nature which is pure luminosity, free of any contrivance. seen in a miraculous blissful display—a dance, if you will.—that shows itself in an emanation form displaying Wisdom and Miraculous Accomplishment, Emptiness and Method, or Luminosity and Compassion. It is so hard for us to understand what that really means.

For us, what we see is the Nirmanakaya, the physical form. Through thinking about it, we can understand the great benefit that Guru Rinpoche has brought. We can understand the extraordinary good fortune that we have to be able to do the practices that he has taught. We can understand that this is compassionate activity. We can understand that by the virtue of what he has done, we have a shot (if you will) at achieving some realization. We have hope; we have a path; we have a method. Through reliance upon his blessing, we come to realize that his very nature is the door to liberation.

If we go deeper, we realize that he is not only the Nirmanakaya form, but also, he is the deeper and more subtle forms. In fact, he is the very display of enlightenment itself. We realize then that Guru Rinpoche is inseparable from our own nature. How do you cut that nature up? The Buddha Nature is the Buddha Nature. And so, when we look at Guru Rinpoche, and we practice devotion in order to achieve a certain natural transmission, aren’t we actually walking through the door of our own nature? Aren’t we actually looking at the true face which is our face as well? Aren’t we actually doing what we do best—seeing something as external which is actually inseparable from us? That’s what we do very well. That’s all that we know how to do.

And so we practice Guru Yoga. Ultimately, we understand that by receiving the empowerment of the Lama, and practicing deeply, to understand the nature of the Lama, is to understand our own nature. That to meditate accordingly is to see the true face which is that nature. Ultimately, we will practice in such a way as to dispel the delusion of separation. We will come to dispel such distinction. We will come to realize that nature as our own nature, an event that is not ordinary.