Why Do You Practice Dharma?

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

If you’re only approaching Dharma by riding on the surface of your mind, you will not stick with it.  You shouldn’t practice Dharma because you like Dharma.  If you do that, there will be a day when you don’t like Dharma.  Dharma is not like listening to music: You like it, you listen to it; you don’t like it, you don’t listen to it.  It’s not that kind of thing.  You should follow the Dharma from a place of spaciousness in your mind, initially because the Buddha says so — and the Buddha is supremely enlightened — and then ultimately from your own knowing, from your own sense of your own nature, from the spaciousness in your mind, and with the dignity that is inherently yours as part of that mind.  From that place of stability, you should choose Dharma, and you should choose it for good reasons.

It is necessary to stabilize the mind so that you can even think about practicing Dharma.  It is important to be stable in your practice.  Being stable in your practice is a step that you need to take before you even commit to stabilizing your mind in your ordinary life.

Look at the mind and see how much stuff you make up all the time.  Why do you practice Dharma?  How much stuff have you made up about Dharma already?  One of you likes to talk about being an old yogi.  Another one of you likes to talk about caves.  You want to talk about the romanticism of practicing Dharma.  Your practice is not going to last if you approach Dharma in that way.  You have to approach Dharma in a solid way because you know that sentient beings are suffering, because you know that you are suffering, because you know that nothing you have tried to date has ended that suffering, and because you know that according to the Buddha’s teaching, there is an end to suffering, and that end is enlightenment. You should practice from a place of space in your mind where you’re not just following yourself down the garden path, making up all these crazy stories about Dharma in the same way that you make up everything about everything.

Come to love the Dharma for what it is, for what it can do, for the rich potential of it.  Love it because it is a practice that, if practiced sincerely, can awaken pure compassion in the mind.  Love it because awakening pure compassion in the mind can be the end of war and of famine and of all kinds of problems that we have on the earth that we haven’t been able to solve.  Love Dharma for the right reasons, from a stable place, not in the same way that you fall in and out of love with everything else.  And in order to do that you must approach Dharma and see and understand it from the place of having a stable mind, from a place of spaciousness.

You are not immune from falling out of love with Dharma until you achieve realization.  The potential is there.  The way to remove that potential is by practicing Dharma in a stable way and for stable reasons.  I don’t think that you’ve thought enough about why you practice.  You say, “Oh, it’s not my nature to do that.  I just become excited about things, and I go into them.  I’m spontaneous.  That’s my nature.”  No, that’s wrong.  It doesn’t work.  You can’t do it that way.  You have to think about it, even if you’ve never thought about anything else before.  You have to think, “Why Dharma?  Why me?  What does this mean?”  If you don’t consider all of these things, if you just do it because it feels right, believe me when I tell you, your feelings are so unstable that one day Dharma will feel wrong.

Please build this fortress carefully with careful consideration and careful thinking.  Even if it’s not your nature to think about anything, anytime, for any length of time, start now.  This is a good reason to start, and it’s very important.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved