An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “How Buddhists Think”
The first step in achieving the cessation of suffering as prescribed by the Buddha is to understand samsara, or cyclic existence. This tends to be difficult for Westerners. They often come to the path assuming that it’s all about “love and light” or about being positive. This is not Buddhist thinking.
As Buddhists wishing to attain knowledge, we must examine the faults of cyclic existence fully and completely. We must understand why cyclic existence doesn’t work. We Westerners don’t want to spend any time on that: we tend to fool ourselves into thinking we’re happy until we get old and die. “There is just too much to do,” we say. “We can’t sit around being sad all the time. Shouldn’t we just think positive?”
That is really how Westerners think when they come to this path. “I’m okay,” they say, “but now I want to figure out how to be better. I want to be spiritual too.”
According to Buddhism, that is absolutely wrong thinking. In order to attain awareness in the Buddhist sense, one must understand the faults of cyclic existence.
The Buddha’s teaching is extremely logical, and very real. So we must enter this path not with blind faith but with our eyes wide open. If you think that to practice the Buddha’s teaching is about coming into an amazing place with exotic wall hangings and sitting around being bliss-ninnies, you’ve got it wrong. Here you’re going to get real, very real. You’re going to look at cyclic existence, and you’re going to face the fact that some day you’re going to die. And it’s up to you whether you waste your time, or whether you use this life in a way that you will see as beneficial. And you will have the capacity to make that distinction.
When you see beautiful, youthful bodies, you will understand that, yes, this is nice, but soon these bodies will sag and become wrinkled; soon they will get sick and die. You have to get real about that, because it’s the truth. No one has ever beaten that rap. When the Buddha teaches us to make use of this precious human rebirth, he doesn’t do it in an exotic, far-flung way. He teaches us to be very honest, very courageous, very real.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved
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