Tibetan Buddhism Quotes

We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don´t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home. Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.

Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.

Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness. Let go. Let Be. See through everything and be free, complete, luminous, at home -- at ease.

Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite." But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we´re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.

No sane person fears nothingness.

The small flower is as total as the sun.

Daily life provides countless occasions for adapting to change and impermanence. Yet we squander these precious opportunities, assuming that we have all the time in the world.

Why should one be a Christian? It is ugly. Be a christ if you can be, but don’t be a Christian. Be a buddha if you have any respect for yourself, but don’t be a Buddhist. The Buddhist believes. Buddha knows.

Historically, the East was more concerned with understanding the mind and the West was more involved in understanding matter.

Always rely on just a happy frame of mind. Let it become one of the fundamental rules of your life. Even if you come across a negative, find something positive in it. You will always be able to find something. And the day you become skillful at finding the positive in the negative, you will dance with joy.

I live in my own way, I don’t consider you. I don’t consider anybody at all—because if you start considering others you can’t live your life authentically. Consider and you will become phony.

There is no greater luxury than meditation. Meditation is the last luxury, because it is the ultimate love affair.

As a man is taught, so he believes. Thoughts being things, they may be planted like seeds in the mind of the child and completely dominate his mental content. Given the favourable soil of the will to believe, whether the seed-thoughts be sound or unsound, whether they be of pure superstition or of realizable truth, they take root and flourish, and make the man what he is mentally.

There is no miserable place waiting for you, no hell realm, sitting and waiting like Alaska—waiting to turn you into ice cream. But whatever you call it—hell or the suffering realms—it is something that you enter by creating a world of neurotic fantasy and believing it to be real. It sounds simple, but that's exactly what happens.

We should reflect on the idea that since the beginning of time sentient beings have been mentally unstable because they have been slaves of delusion, they lack the eye of wisdom to see the path leading to nirvana and enlightenment, and they lack the necessary guidance of a spiritual teacher. Moment by moment they are indulging in negative actions, which will eventually bring about their downfall.

We just have to remind ourselves that the source of any happiness is mind itself.

The entire path is a shift in perception.

There is no need to choose. Why not live choicelessly? Why not live all that life makes available to you? Don’t be a spiritualist and don’t be a materialist: be both. Don’t be a Zorba and don’t be a Buddha; be both: Zorba the Buddha. Enjoy all that God has showered on you. That’s

They asked a wise man: Why don’t we ever hear you backbiting and slandering? He said: I’m still not happy with myself to start with others.

You must understand that even if your adversaries seem to be harming you, in the end their destrucive activity will turn against them.

Don’t become more knowledgeable, become more innocent. Drop all that you know, forget all that you know. Remain wondering, but don’t transform your wondering into questions, because once the wonder is changed into a question, sooner or later the question will bring knowledge. And knowledge is a false coin.

Achala, worrying and scheming about your next life, before you have even completed this one, is not a good practice." Rinpoche

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

But, nevertheless, if there is even the slightest recognition, liberation is easy. Should you ask why this is so—it is because once the awesome, terrifying and fearful appearances arise, the awareness does not have the luxury of distraction. The awareness is one-pointedly concentrated.

The light of the sun is the manifestation of the clarity of the sky; and the sky is the basic condition necessary for the manifestation of the sun's light. So, too, in the sky two, three, four, or any number of suns could arise; but the sky always remains indivisibly one sky. Similarly, every individual's state of presence is unique and distinct, but the void nature of the individual is universal, and common to all beings.

William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able to fully engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists. It is here that Yeats’s diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true “racist” conviction of one’s own superiority.

Just calling one's practice "approach and accomplishment" and staying in retreat for years will produce nothing but hardship. Completing hundreds of millions of mantras will not even bring the warmth of the ordinary qualities that mark one's progress on the path! In other words, if the essential points of the path are not taken into account, perseverance will amount to nothing more than chasing a mirage.

The Heart-mantra of Dependent Origination (rten-'brel snying-po [རྟེན་འབྲེལ་སྙིང་པོ]), which liberates the enduring continuum of phenomena and induces the appearance of multiplying relics ('phel-gdung [འཕེལ་གདུང་] and rainbow lights, is: [OṂ] YE DHARMĀ HETUPRABHAVĀ HETUN TEṢĀṂ TATHĀGATO HY AVADAT TEṢĀṂ CA YO NIRODHO EVAṂ VĀDI MAHĀŚRAMAṆAḤ [YE SVĀHĀ] ('Whatever events arise from a cause, the Tathagāta [Buddha, "Thus-gone"] has told the cause thereof, and the great virtuous ascetic has taught their cessation as well [so be it]').

People who know how to keep their mouths shut are rare.

Magic is not something supernatural, but part of the field dynamics of nature.

If there is destruction of hope, there is freedom from gods [lha]; if there is destruction of fear, there is freedom from spirits ['dre, demons].

All deities and demons, all heavens and hells are internal.

The idea of a separate center is the root of the ego.

Peaceful death is really an essential human right, more essential perhaps even than the right to vote or the right to justice; it is a right on which, all religious traditions tell us, a great deal depends for the well-being and spiritual future of the dying person. There

Truth makes little sense and has no real impact if it is merely a collection of abstract ideas. Truth that is living experience, on the other hand, is challenging, threatening, and transforming. The first kind of truth consists of information collected and added, from a safe distance, to our mental inventory. The second kind involves risking our familiar and coherent interpretation of the world -it is an act of surrender, of complete and embodied cognition that is seeing, feeling, intuiting, and comprehending all at once. Living truth leads us ever more deeply into the unknown territory of what our life is.

To just be--to be--amidst all doings, achievings, and becomings. This is the natural state of mind, or original, most fundamental state of being. This is unadulterated Buddha-nature. This is like finding our balance.

Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, 'You idiot! What's wrong with you? Are you blind?' But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped into you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: 'Are you hurt? Can I help you up?' Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion.

Oh, noble child, everything is severing the mind. As for the mind, it is severing pride. There is nothing whatsoever that is not included in pride. If one simply understands that it is merely the production of pride, then, for example, one is like a thief in an empty house: by simply recognizing [the situation], grasping is impossible. Having correctly understood, there is no practice with an intentional objective. Because it crushes any hesitations (mi phod), it is explained as Chöd.

Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM).

All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism. Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.

You do not need to fabricate at all. Once you utterly let be, involvement in thoughts of past, present and future subside. By letting be, you are no longer involved in the thoughts of the three times. When utterly letting be, wakefulness is vividly present.

Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is nothing other than the state beyond all obstacles, in the same way that from the peak of a very high mountain one always sees the sun. Nirvana is not a paradise or some special place of happiness, but is in fact the condition beyond all dualistic concepts, including those of happiness and suffering. When all our obstacles have been overcome, and we find ourselves in a state of total presence, the wisdom of enlightenment manifests spontaneously without limits, just like the infinite rays of the sun. The clouds have dissolved, and the sun is finally free to shine once again.

You can cheat a person—but in what can you cheat him? You can take some money or something else from him. But the man who knows the beauty of trust will not be distracted by these small things. He will still love you, he will still trust you. And then a miracle happens: if a man really trusts you, it is impossible to cheat him, almost impossible. It

Prostration: placing the body in reverence, to submit, to surrender. In many faiths it is used to relinquish the ego. In Tibetan tantric Buddhism they do one hundred thousand prostrations to overcome pride. In Islam, prostration has been known to overcome many diseases.

if you don’t trust in yourself then no other trust is ever possible.

Without hope, Chöd practitioners are freed from the limits of hope and fear; having cut the ropes of grasping, definitely enlightened, where does one go?

In the beginning I took the teacher as the teacher, In the middle I took the scriptures as the teacher, In the end I took my own mind as the teacher.

The great master Padmasambhava said, Even if my view is higher than the sky, The attention I pay to my actions and their effects is finer than flour.

Live joyously, guiltlessly, live totally, live intensely. And then heaven is no more a metaphysical concept, it is your own experience.

To live in the moment is innocence, to live without the past is innocence, to live without conclusions is innocence, to function out of the state of not knowing is innocence. And the moment you function out of such tremendous silence which is not burdened by any past, out of such tremendous stillness which knows nothing, the experience that happens is beauty. Whenever you feel beauty—in the rising sun, in the stars, in the flowers, or in the face of a woman or a man—wherever and whenever you feel beauty, watch. And one thing will always be found: you had functioned without mind, you had functioned without any conclusion, you had simply functioned spontaneously. The moment gripped you, and the moment gripped you so deeply that you were cut off from the past. And when you are cut off from the past you are cut off from the future automatically, because past and future are two aspects of the same coin; they are not separate, and they are not separable either. You can toss a coin: sometimes it is heads, sometimes it is tails, but the other part is always there, hiding behind. Past

Do not encumber your mind with useless thoughts. What good is it to brood over the past and fret about the future? Dwell in the simplicity of the present moment. Live in harmony with the dharma. Make it the heart of your life and experience. Be the master of your own destiny.

. . . install a tracking system--free of judgment or guilt--that you use just to record how you're doing, on a constant basis. In Tibetan this tracking system is known as tundruk, or "six times a day;" we call it a six-time book. If you follow this system, you'll get results.

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.

It is only cowards who reduce the tremendously valuable capacity of wondering to questions. The really brave, the courageous person, leaves it as it is. Rather than changing it into a question, he jumps into the mystery. Rather than trying to control it, he allows the mystery to possess him.

It is always beneficial to be near a spiritual teacher. These masters are like gardens or medicinal plants, sanctuaries of wisdom. In the presence of a realized master, you will rapidly attain enlightenment. In the presence of an erudite scholar, you will acquire great knowledge. In the presence of a great meditator, spiritual experience will dawn in your mind. In the presence of a bodhisattva, your compassion will expand, just as an ordinary log placed next to a log of sandalwood becomes saturated, little by little, with its fragrance.

Atisha says: Awareness inside, compassion on the outside. Compassion is the outer side of awareness, the exterior of awareness. Awareness is your interiority, subjectivity. Compassion is relating with others, sharing with others.

One Jewish lady was talking to the neighbor, and she said, “The psychoanalyst who is treating my son has said that my son suffers from an Oedipus complex.” And the neighbor lady said, “Oedipus schmoedipus! Doesn’t matter as long as he is a good boy and loves his mother!

It is as if I have entered what the Tibetans call the Bardo-literally, between-two-existences- a dreamlike hallucination that precedes reincarnation, not necessarily in human form…In case I should need them, instructions for passage through the Bardo are contained in the Tibetan book of the dead- a guide for the living since it teaches that a man’s last thoughts will determine the quality of his reincarnation.

The Gnostics believed that we can experience resurrection before death. In other words, Gnostics are granted such special knowledge that they can regenerate their bodies and resurrect themselves before dying. Moreover, they have special abilities to control their DNA. The Sufi Dervishes know and teach these practices. Additionally, in Dzogchen (a teaching from the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism) they speak of the "Rainbow Body". The exceptional practitioners of Dzogchen, when they are about to die, concentrate on their Body of Pure Light. His physical body releases itself into a body of non-material light (a Sambhogakaya) with the capacity to exist and to remain where and when indicated by one's compassion. In Gnosticism, this is called the radiant body, resurrection body, or immortal body (the soma athanaton). This body has also been called 'The Philosopher's Stone.

To say 'I want to have sex with this person' is to express a desire which is not intellectually directed in the way that 'I want to eradicate poverty in the world' is an intellectually directed desire. Furthernore, the gratification of sexual desire can only ever give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar said: 'When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching.

The text presented here, the Vajra Essence by Düdjom Lingpa, a nineteenth-century master of the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism, is known as the Nelug Rangjung in Tibetan, meaning “the natural emergence of the nature of existence.”1 This is an ideal teaching in which to unravel some of the common misunderstandings of Tibetan Buddhism, since it is a sweeping practice that can take one from the basics all the way to enlightenment in a single lifetime. The present volume explains the initial section on shamatha, or meditative quiescence, about nine percent of the entire Vajra Essence root text.

Meditation does offer a sane way to work with our mind. But we do not meditate to get rid of thoughts. This is the number one misunderstanding. Thinking, like breathing, is a natural activity. Trying to impose an artificial blankness is the exact opposite of how we work with the natural clarity of mind.

...[A]ccording to Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition, a being that achieves Buddhahood, although freed from Samsara,the 'wheel of suffering', as the phenomenon of existence is known, will continue to return to work for the benefit of all other sentient beings until such time as each one is similarly liberated.

Without discursive thought it is just dharma practice. Hope together with aim obscures. One does not cut through pride by meditatively cultivating the desire for happiness. If there is hope, even the hope for buddhas, it is a negative force. If there is apprehension, even apprehension about hells, it is a negative force.

You yourself can be god. You really are that, in fact. You, yourself, are reality. You, yourself, are buddha. (p. 18)

Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence.

The preservation of Buddhism is preserving your own internal heart. If Tibetans became terrorists they might win back Tibet, but Buddhism would be destroyed by that attitude.

The big realization when we go beyond the ego is simply seeing that we've always been ok.

You are already the awakeness that you seek!

Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought.

using an object as support allows awareness to realize itself.

Buddhism is filled with many wonderful ideas, but it is the recognition of awareness that takes us from samara to nirvana.

Even at the moment of direct perception when gnostic awareness of emptiness as form and form as emptiness is experienced, the mind is preparing to dualize the situation.

Of all footprints That of the elephant is supreme; Of all mindfulness meditations That on death is supreme.7

You see, we are all dying. It’s only a matter of time.

life is inherently sacred and must be lived with sacred intensity and purpose

It is best not to silence the mind with a crushing blow of our will.

The moment you know, you destroy all poetry. The moment you know, and think that you know, you have created a barrier between yourself and that which is. Then everything is distorted. Then you don’t hear with your ears, you translate. Then you don’t see with your eyes, you interpret. Then you don’t experience with your heart, you think that you experience. Then all possibility of meeting with existence in immediacy, in intimacy, is lost. You have fallen apart. This is the original sin. And this is the whole story, the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once they have eaten the fruit of knowledge they are driven out of paradise. Not that somebody drove them out, not that God ordered them to get out of paradise, they themselves fell. Knowing they were no more innocent, knowing they were separate from existence, knowing they were egos…knowing created such a barrier, an iron barrier. You ask me, “What is innocence?” Vomit knowledge! The fruit of the tree of knowledge has to be vomited. That’s what meditation is all about. Throw it out of your system: it is poison, pure poison. Live without knowledge, knowing that “I don’t know.” Function out of this state of not knowing and you will know what beauty is. Socrates

Don’t think about Buddhist terminology; don’t think about what the books say or anything like that. Just ask yourself simply, “How, at this moment, do I interpret myself?” That’s all.

Primordial wisdom [Skt. jñāna; Tib. ཡེ་ཤེས་, yeshé; Wyl. ye shes] has many names, but in truth it refers simply to the inseparability of the ground and fruit, the one and only essence-drop [thig le nyag gcig] of the dharmakaya. If it is assessed from the standpoint of its utterly pure nature, it is the actual dharmakaya, primordial Buddhahood. For, from its own side, it is free from every obscuration. We must understand that we are Buddha from the very beginning. Without this understanding, we will fail to recognize the spontaneously present mandala of the ground, and we will be obliged to assert, in accordance with the vehicle of the paramitas, that Buddhahood has a cause. We will fail to recognize the authentic view of the Secret Mantra.

In India we have two different systems. One we call history; history takes note of the facts. Another we call purana, mythology; it takes note of the truth. We have not written histories about Buddha, Mahavira or Krishna, no. That would have been dragging something immensely beautiful into the muddy unconsciousness of humanity. We have not written histories about these people, we have written myths. What is a myth? A myth is a parable, a parable that only points to the moon but says nothing about it—a finger pointing to the moon, an indication, an arrow, saying nothing.

And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder. They are dangerous because they give you the feeling that you know, although you know not. They give you this misconception about yourself that now questions have been solved. “I know what The Bible says, I know what the Koran says, I know what the Gita says. I have arrived.” You will become a parrot; you will repeat things but you will not know anything. This is not the way to know—knowledge is not the way to know. Then what is the way to know? Wonder. Let your heart dance with wonder. Be full of wonder: throb with it, breathe it in, breathe it out. Why be in such a hurry for the answer? Can’t you allow a mystery to remain a mystery? I know there is a great temptation not to allow it to remain a mystery, to reduce it to knowledge.

Past and future are two aspects of the same coin. The name of the coin is mind. When the whole coin is dropped, that dropping is innocence. Then you don’t know who you are, then you don’t know what is; there is no knowledge. But you are, existence is, and the meeting of these two is-nesses—the small is-ness of you, meeting with the infinite is-ness of existence—that meeting, that merger, is the experience of beauty. Innocence is the door; through innocence you enter into beauty. The more innocent you become, the more existence becomes beautiful. The more knowledgeable you are, the more and more existence is ugly, because you start functioning from conclusions, you start functioning from knowledge. The

But beyond the mind, beyond our thoughts, there is something we call the 'nature of the mind', the mind's true condition, which is beyond all limits. If it is beyond the mind, though, how can we approach an understanding of it? Let's take the example of a mirror. When we look into a mirror we see in it the reflected images of any objects that are in front of it; we don't see the nature of the mirror. But what do we mean by this 'nature of the mirror'? We mean its capacity to reflect, definable as its clarity, its purity, and its limpidity, which are indispensable conditions for the manifestation of reflections. This 'nature of the mirror' is not something visible, and the only way we can conceive of it is through the images reflected in the mirror. In the same way, we only know and have concrete experience of that which is relative to our condition of body, voice, and mind. But this itself is the way to understand their true nature.

discover and develop, naturally and spontaneously, a compassionate desire to serve all beings, as well as a direct knowledge of how best you can do so, with whatever skill or ability you have, in whatever circumstances you find yourself.

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, when asked how to strike a better balance between family, work and self-realisation says: "You need the intention, good scheduling, and you have to be creative. If you don't find time to practice, one of the three is missing.

The naked body of the female consort illustrates freedom from the obscuration of conceptual symbols. As an illustration of unchanging great bliss endowed with the sixteen joys, she appears in the form of a youthful, sixteen-year-old girl. Her hair hangs loose, showing the unlimited way that wisdom expands impartially out of basic space. She is adorned with five bone ornaments. Of these, the ring at the top of her head symbolizes the wisdom of the basic space of phenomena [dharmadhātu], while her bone necklace represents the wisdom of equality. Her earrings stand for discerning wisdom, her bracelets for mirrorlike wisdom, and her belt for all-accomplishing wisdom. Illustrating the unity of calm abiding and insight, her secret space is joined in union.

But karma is not in fact a material accumulation, and does not depend on externals; rather its power to condition us depends on the obstacles that impede our knowledge. If we compare our karma and the ignorance that creates it to a dark room, knowledge of the primordial state would be like a lamp, which, when lit in the room, at once causes the darkness to disappear, enlightening everything. In the same way, if one has the presence of the primordial state, one can overcome all hindrances in an instant.

The Bodhisattva is in no rush. For once we have tasted a single drop of the bliss of bringing others into that freedom, with the Spirit of Enlightenment of love and compassion, once we have loosened the grip of the solid, separated, alienated self that is the core of self-centeredness, then we are already happy in a certain way. The Bodhisattva is always joyful, even when suffering. Bodhisattvas are always happy and cheerful under pressure, because they have felt the essence of reality as freedom (p. 223)

I’m saying that if you want to be happy, eradicate your attachment; cut your concrete concepts. The way to cut them is not troublesome—just change your attitude; switch your attitude, that’s all. It’s not really a big deal! It’s really skillful, reasonable. The way Buddhism explains this is reasonable. It’s not something in which you have to super-believe. I’m not saying you have to try to be a superwoman or superman. It’s reasonable and logical. Simply changing your attitude eliminates your concrete concepts.

There is a deep urge in man to know things which are worthless, to know things which make you feel special—because only you know those things and nobody else does. Man wants to be special, and nothing makes you more special than so-called esoteric knowledge. That is why esoteric knowledge remains important. All kinds of rubbish go on in the name of esoteric knowledge—that the earth is hollow, that inside the earth there are great civilizations. And there are people who still believe in it, and in many more such stories.

They are all people like us, you know.” There you have a sense of belonging that is refined, and above all free and active in any situation. Some spiritual traditions have recognized the importance of this openness. Christianity, for example, talks about seeing in every individual our brother or sister. Tibetan Buddhism invites us to carry out a curious mental exercise: to look at whomever we meet as someone who, in a previous life, of the infinite series of incarnations through which we have passed, has been our mother.

No matter how confused, perturbed, and negative we may sometimes feel, our Buddha nature is always there. It can never be lost or damaged. This Buddha nature is the essential nature of our mind. It is primordially pure, replete with all the qualities of a Buddha.

What makes it possible to imagine ourselves as other beings? What does our capacity to exchange ourselves with others tell us about ourselves? If the beliefs we have about the world and ourselves are nothing more than ideas, then who and what are we? These are the very questions that hint at the absolute truth of emptiness, the ultimate reality that allows us to liberate ourselves from fixed and fabricated identities. Many opportunities to discuss this lie ahead, but for now just hold these questions in a creative and playful way.

Beginners will first meditate upon equanimity. Once that is established, they will then meditate upon the remaining three [immeasurable qualities of love, compassion, and joy].... First, toward all those who are relatives, attachment is to be abandoned as though they were neutral. Then abandon aversion for enemies as though they were neutral and remain without partiality. In order to be free from delusion even toward the neutral, have the intention to dispel the passions of beings all at once. Meditate like this without clinging. —Resting the Mind in Repose (sems nyid ngal gso)

Timely Rain In the jungles of flaming ego, May there be cool iceberg of bodhicitta. On the racetrack of bureaucracy, May there be the walk of the elephant. May the sumptuous castle of arrogance Be destroyed by vajra confidence. In the garden of gentle sanity, May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.

In Dzokchen, compassion is much more than the virtue of loving kindness. Nor does the word compassion in the Dzokchen context denote its English etymological meaning, “suffering together” or “empathy,” although both these meanings may be inferred. Essentially, compassion indicates an open and receptive mind responding spontaneously to the exigencies of an ever-changing field of vibration to sustain the optimal awareness that serves self-and-others’ ultimate desire for liberation and well-being. The conventional meaning of compassion denotes the latter, active part of this definition, and, due to the accretions of Christian connotation, response is limited to specifically virtuous activity. “Responsiveness” defines the origin and cause of selfless activity that can encompass all manner of response. On this nondual Dzokchen path virtue is the effect, not the cause; the ultimate compassionate response is whatever action maximizes Knowledge—loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness.

If we lack the proper antidotes of emptiness and bodhichitta, we will not be able to control our minds when frightening appearances manifest. It is considered a sign of progress in this practice if we go unconscious, and then, when we wake up, have forgotten our names and whose bodies we have! This is the ceasing of clinging to the body.

The root of all happiness is the mind; the root of all suffering is the mind. The root of all afflictions and the root of all faith, devotion, love and compassion come down to the mind. If we know the nature of our mind, we can make use of the great treasure and eventually gain perfect happiness and the ultimate result of liberation and omniscience.

The gnarled pine, I would have said, touch it. This is China. Horticulturalists around the world have come to study it. Yet no one has ever been able to explain why it grows like a corkscrew, just as no one can adequately explain China. But like that tree, there it is, old, resilient, and oddly magnificent. Within that tree are the elements in nature that have inspired Chinese artists for centuries: gesture over geometry, subtlety over symmetry, constant flow over static form. And the temples, walk and touch them. This is China. Don't merely stare at these murals and statues. Fly up to the crossbeams, get down on your hands and knees, and press your head to the floor tiles. Hide behind that pillar and come eye to eye with its flecks of paint. Imagine that you are the interior decorator who is a thousand years in age. Start with a bit of Tibetan Buddhism, plus a dash each of animism and Taoism. A hodgepodge, you say? No, what is in those temples is an amalgam that is pure Chinese, a lovely shabby elegance, a glorious new motley that makes China infinitely intriguing. Nothing is ever completely thrown away and replaced. If one period of influence falls out of favor, it is patched over. The old views still exist, one chipped layer beneath, ready to pop through with the slightest abrasion. That is the Chinese aesthetic and also its spirit. Those are the traces that have affected all who have traveled along China's roads.

Atiśa, following Nāgārjuna’s commentator Candrakīrti, held that although our everyday language adequately describes apparent reality, philosophical discourse nevertheless has a necessary role: not system-building but the criticism of our presuppositions, dismantling them until we arrive at the profound realization of emptiness and the opening that this entails.

Many people, even in this country, have material problems because they are concerned for only themselves. Even though society offers many good situations, they are still in the preta realm. I think so, isn’t it? You are living in America but you’re still living in the preta realm—of the three lower realms, the hungry ghost realm; you are still living in the hungry ghost realm.

Dripping charnel  grounds of light - I examine hope &  fear - blue-black body  monster of enlightenment - call me Youthful Lightning Bolt -  tired I slump - desire's already  here - I don't care - my wrathful rosary coiled      snake   on my cushion -  I close my tired   eyes -  sleep has been  troubled but   my mother's  cancer hasn't  spread -      still I  am the Cemetary King

Silence is the Buddha‘s greatest expression. It‘s the Buddha‘s great teaching, what the Hindus call „You are That“ in the Upanishads. „You are the ultimate reality. You are God!“ the Hindus boldly declare. But the Buddha‘s way of affirming that fact is by being silent, because if you are that, after all, if you are what the theists think is God, you already know it yourself. (p. 15)

Try not to be so analytical that you lose your creative vision, your soul‘s third eye of innate intuition. Open your heart. Be willing to be foolish, even if it means straying from the mainstream agenda and risking ridicule. I think we all sense that the world is ready for us to think outside the box, because that box of limited, conventional, rational thinking is destroying us. (p. 75)

Just as worn-out clothes can never again be made as new, It's no use seeing a doctor once you're terminally ill; You'll have to go. We humans living on this earth Are like streams and rivers flowing toward the ocean - All living beings are heading for that single destination. Now, like a small bird flying off from a treetop, I, too, will not be here much longer; soon I must move on. – Padampa Sangye

We have the assurance of the enlightened beings that reality is goodness, that reality is freedom from suffering, that reality is bliss. So we should never fear to open ourselves to reality, to cast aside our preconceptions and biases, and to open more and more to whatever turns out to be real. You can have faith in enlightenment, faith in evolutionary potential, faith in infinity, faith in your infinite self. (p. 222)

The forms of the central and surrounding deities... should not be protruding like a clay statue or cast image, yet neither should they be flat like a painting. In contrast, they should be apparent, yet not truly existent, like a rainbow in the sky or the reflection of the moon in a lake. They should appear as though conjured up by a magician. Clear appearance involves fixing the mind one-pointedly on these forms with a sense of vividness, nakedness, lucidity, and clarity.

The Wheel of Life is painted on the outside walls of many Tibetan and Bhutanese monasteries in order to educate people in the basics of Buddhism. Yet it is not often found in Japan. In fact, Japanese Buddhists don't think or talk much at all about rebirth in the Six Realms. When they do talk about the afterlife, they tend to speak of becoming a Buddha, attaining Nirvana, or going to the Pure Land—expressions that they often use rather vaguely to mean roughly the same thing.

Buddhism is not a religion in the Western sense but rather a practical set of ideas and approaches toward understanding the workings of life. To be more precise, it’s a system of practices and philosophical tenets designed to help people overcome their sufferings. It is to the soul what weightlifting is for muscles—it strengthens the self to the extent that a person’s spirit, through devoted practice, becomes impervious to external influences. And it’s open and available to everyone.

In what is now known as Bodh Gaya…a Buddhist temple stands beside an ancient pipal, descended from that bodhi tree, or “enlightenment tree,” and I watched the rising of the morning star and came away no wiser than before. But later I wondered if the Tibetan monks were aware that the Bodhi tree was murmuring with gusts of birds, while another large pipal, so close by that it touched the holy tree with many branches, was without life. I make no claim for the event: I simply declare what I saw at Bodh Gaya.

The Three Jewels are the foundation of all forms of Buddhism, and the first jewel is the Buddha. The word buddha means „the Awakened One“. And it doesn‘t mean only Shakyamuni Buddha, formerly the prince Siddhartha, who became a perfect Buddha in the sixth century before the Common Era in India, whom we sometimes call the „historical Buddha“. Buddha means all those who have awakened from the sleep of ignorance and blossomed into their full potential. Awakened and blossomed, they are teachers of others. (pp. 30-31).

Any change in your mind, positive or negative, affects all others. The wish-granting gem tree is a morphic resonance field. The energy of one contains within it the energy of all. Every action affects all other actions. Whenever you turn your mind towards the wish-granting gems, everyone else‘s mind is turned in that way, too. The planet‘s mind turns with your mind. If you let your mind go in some negative, paranoid, self-indulgent, distracted way, the planet‘s mind turns in that way. You‘re totally interconnected with everything.

If someone has compassion, he is a Buddha; Without compassion, he is a Lord of Death. With compassion, the root of Dharma is planted, Without compassion, the root of Dharma is rotten. One with compassion is kind even when angry, One without compassion will kill even as he smiles. For one with compassion, even his enemies will turn into friends, Without compassion, even his friends turn into enemies. With compassion, one has all Dharmas, Without compassion, one has no Dharma at all. With compassion, one is a Buddhist, Without compassion, one is worse than a heretic. Even if meditating on voidness, one needs compassion as its essence. A Dharma practitioner must have a compassionate nature. Compassion is the distinctive characteristic of Buddhism. Compassion is the very essence of all Dharma. Great compassion is like a wish-fulfilling gem. Great compassion will fulfill the hopes of self and others. Therefore, all of you, practitioners and laypeople, Cultivate compassion and you will achieve Buddhahood. May all men and women who hear this song, With great compassion, benefit all beings!

The initial function of spirituality emerged from questioning the human condition and also from deep experiences of wonder. The word religion itself, initially meaning to “reconnect,” seems to have come from direct experiences of something larger than just a set of fixed ideas. It marked a return to something essential that we just failed to recognize in the myopia of our everyday lives. How curious that we turn experiences of awe into dogmas and stagnant ideas. That we have come to associate faith with fundamentalism, blindness, and even terrorism gives us something important to look at.

What lies at the root of our unenlightened existence is our fundamental misconception of the ultimate nature of reality. Therefore, by cultivating correct insight into true nature of reality, we begin the process of undoing unenlightened existence and set in motion the process of liberation. Samsara and nirvana are distinguished on the basis of whether we’re in a state of ignorance or wisdom. As the Tibetan masters say, when we’re ignorant, we’re in samsara; when we develop wisdom, we’re liberated. The ultimate antidote for eliminating fundamental ignorance is the wisdom realizing emptiness. It is this emptiness of mind that is the final nirvana.

Students often ask if they should only invoke the guru in the context of a formal daily practice, or if it can be done anywhere. The answer is that it depends on the student. Dharma bums who roam the streets of Kathmandu smoking hashish and sitting in cafés nursing a half-empty cup of cappuccino for most of the day should probably sit formally and recite ten million or one hundred million mantras. Whereas those who have demanding jobs in London, New York or Paris might benefit more from reciting the mantra on their way to work, or as they wait for a bus. The method each student is given will depend entirely on their personal situation and how disciplined they are.

That you have to ask Krishnamurti, not me. That is not my business. He loves it, that’s how he has grown. For centuries, for many, many lives, he has been moving towards a tunnel vision. And the tunnel vision has its own beauties, because whatsoever you see, you see very clearly because your eyes are focused. Hence the clarity of Krishnamurti. Nobody has ever been so clear, so crystal clear. Nobody has ever been so logical, so rational; nobody has ever been so analytical. His profundity in going into things and their details is simply unbelievable. But that is part of his tunnel vision. You cannot have everything, remember. If you want clarity you will need tunnel vision; you will have to become more and more focused on less and less.

Some people decided they couldn‘t wait for society to achieve freedom over a long period of time, felt they couldn‘t wait for enlightenment through many, many lifetimes of their own. These people decided they would achieve this perfect freedom and perfect ability to help others achieve freedom in a single lifetime. This was the beginning of the Tantric tradition, which was very esoteric at first. In the Tibetan view, Tantra emerged at the same time as the Mahayana, around one hundred years before the Common Era, but it remained completely esoteric for seven hundred years, without a single book on it being published. In its esoteric tradition, people lived on the fringes, on the margins; they were the magical people, the magicians, the siddas, the adepts. (p. 20)

Institutionalized Buddhism throughout Asia not only has a doctrinal commitment to rebirth but also has an economic and political one. In contrast to most Tibetan lamas, for whom the belief in the doctrine of rebirth is essential to the continuing authority of their institutions in exile, other Asian Buddhists in the West have felt freer to adapt their teachings to suit the needs of a secular and skeptical audience whose interest in the dharma is as a way of finding meaning here and now rather than after death. One will search in vain for any discussion of rebirth in the numerous writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, for example. Although he comes from a country (Vietnam) in which the belief is deeply rooted, he now seems to be moving toward a view that equates karma with some form of genetic inheritance and transmissioṇ

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I fall in. I am lost … I am hopeless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. 2) I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place. But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out. 3) I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I see it is there. I still fall in … it’s a habit My eyes are open I know where I am It is my fault. I get out immediately. 4) I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I walk around it. 5) I walk down another street. The purpose of reflecting on death is to make a real change in the depths of your heart, and to come to learn how to avoid the “hole in the sidewalk,” and how to “walk down another street.

The great difference is that this version relies on the work of W. W. Rockhill. Rockhill was an American diplomat who lived in China in the nineteenth century, a linguistic genius—he must have been the first American to know Tibetan; he also produced a Chinese-English dictionary. And in 1884 he published a life of the Buddha according to the Tibetan canoṇ It draws from material of equivalent antiquity to that of the Pali Canon, from a source called the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. He went through it in the 1870s and pulled out of it a story that is almost identical to the story that I reconstructed from the Pali materials. Somewhat embarrassingly, I hadn’t actually read Rockhill until quite recently. I didn’t think the Tibetan material would be relevant. But I was wrong. The Tibetan Vinaya, from the Mūlasarvāstivāda school, gives us the same story, with the same characters, and the same relationships. The two versions don’t agree in every detail, but they’re remarkably similar.

I had a powerful personal experience of this truth. A few weeks before the end of my Peace Corps time in Thailand, I was sitting quietly in a friend’s garden listening to him read from a Tibetan text called, in that early translation, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. My mind had become quite concentrated and at one point, when the text was speaking of the “unborn nature of the mind,” there was a sudden and spontaneous experience of the mind opening … to zero. This momentary opening to the “unmanifest,” a reality beyond the ordinary mind and body, had the force of a lightning bolt shattering the solidified illusion of self. Immediately following this, a phrase kept repeating in my mind, “There’s no me, there’s no me.” This experience radically changed my understanding of things. Of course, since then, feelings or thoughts of “me,” of a sense of self, have arisen many times, but, still, the deep knowing remains that even the sense of self is selfless—that it’s just another thought.

The basic foundation of the practice of morality is to refrain from ten unwholesome actions: three pertaining to the body, four pertaining to speech, and three pertaining to thought. The three physical non-virtues are: (1) killing: intentionally taking the life of a living being, whether a human being, an animal, or even an insect; (2) stealing: taking possession of another’s property without his or her consent, regardless of its value; and (3) sexual misconduct: committing adultery. The four verbal non-virtues are: (4) lying: deceiving others through spoken word or gesture; (5) divisiveness: creating dissension by causing those in agreement to disagree or those in disagreement to disagree further; (6) harsh speech: verbally abusing others; and (7) senseless speech: talking about foolish things motivated by desire and so forth. The three mental non-virtues are: (8) covetousness: desiring to possess something that belongs to someone else; (9) harmful intent: wishing to injure others, whether in a great or small way; and (10) wrong view: holding that such things as rebirth, the law of cause and effect, or the Three Jewels8 do not exist.

Initially, we should practice Chöd alone in our rooms at night, quietly, with less fear. It is by gradually developing bodhicitta and wisdom realizing emptiness—not by just becoming braver—that we can confidently realize that whatever appears or happens can be transformed into the path. At that point, we should become more determined in our place of practice, Do not, under any circumstances, endanger your life in the choice of a place. Unless we have great experience, we should never do this practice in any place that is threatened by falling rocks or trees, possible floods, or the threat of a collapsing house. Eventually, when we achieve full confidence in Chöd, there is no need to go to violent places at all. This is because terrifying visions will appear wherever we are. That is important because we need terrifying visions of spirits if we are to practice Chöd sincerely. People have different mental capacities for fear. Some are too brave, some are too afraid. Both of these types of people will find Chöd difficult. We must have some fear for this practice to be successful. A desperate search for the "I" causes fear to develop. The best method for overcoming this fear is bodhicitta and wisdom realizing emptiness. It is because of the need for fear that practice should be done alone. Any group retreat on Chöd lessens the fear involved. Engaging in the practice at night also increases the necessary fear.

Those who practice the Dharma of the Mahayana in accordance with the Buddha's intention are known as bodhisattvas. If you practice the teachings of the Mahayana, you can reach the level of the great bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara and Manjushri, in the best case, or become like the Buddha's two main disciples Shariputra and Maudgalyayana, who were gifted with insight and miraculous powers. Even if you are unable to practice to the full in this life, you will at least be reborn among the principal disciples of the future Buddha, Maitreya. The buddhas being those who have totally conquered the enemies of ignorance and the other emotions, they are often referred to by the synonym 'Victorious Ones,' while bodhisattvas, in many texts including the Tibetan original of the root verses of these teachings, are called 'children of the Victorious Ones'. Who, then, are the children of the buddhas? In the case of Buddha Shakyamuni, the child of his body was his physical son, Prince Rahula. The children of his speech were all those who heard him teach and attained the level of arhart - the great beings such as Shariputra, Maudgalayana, the sixteen arhats and others, who became the holders of his teachings. Above all, the children of the buddha's mind are the great bodhisattvas like Avalokiteshvara and Manjushri, who carry out their noble intention to bring all beings to enlightenment. For, just as a great monarch with a thousand children would choose the one with the most perfect qualities to be his heir, so, too, a buddha regards as his authentic heirs the bodhisattvas who have perfected the union of wisdom and compassion.

As in other Buddhist Tantric techniques, recommended preliminaries for these practices include developing skill at both calm-abiding (zhi gnas; śamatha) and insight meditation (lhag mthong; vipaśyanā). As in earlier Buddhist teachings, many Chöd dehadāna practices emphasize renunciation, purification, and self-transformation through the accumulation of merit and the exhaustion of demerit. Rather than suggesting that one must wait to accumulate adequate merit before offering the gift of the body, however, Chöd provides the opportunity for immediately efficacious offering of the body through techniques of visualization. Using a technique which echoes the traditional Buddhist teaching of the of the mind-made body (manomayākāya), the practitioner engages in visualizations which allow her to experience the non-duality of agent and object as she offers her body. The process of giving the body as a means of attainment is commonly articulated in Chöd practice texts (sgrub pa; sādhana). These practice texts exhibit the framework of mature Tantra sādhana, including the stages of generating bodhicitta, going for refuge, meditating on the four immeasurables, and making the eight-limbed offering. Generally speaking, the main section of a developed Chöd sādhana has three components. The first two—a transference of consciousness (nam mkha’ sgo ‘byed) practice, and a body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) practice—have distinctly purifying purposes. The Chöd transference of consciousness practice has parallels with other Buddhist practices called "’pho ba." In this part of the visualization practice, the practitioner’s consciousness is "ejected" from one's body through the Brahma aperture at the crown of one's head. At this time, one's consciousness can be visualized as becoming identical with an enlightened consciousness, which is embodied in a figure such as Machik, Vajrayoginī (Rdo rje rnal byor ma) or Vajravārāhī (Rdo rje phag mo). [....] In th[e] first stage of this transformation, the practitioner identifies with an enlightened being, thus overcoming attachment to her own body-mind aggregates and purifying them through this non-attachment. In the second stage, the practitioner can extend this identification: the practitioner identifies the microcosm of her body with macrocosms of the mundane and supramundane worlds. The body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) stage also allows the practitioner to reconceptualize her body as expanding through space and time and becoming indistinguishable from the realm of the supramundane, or the Dharmadhātu (chos kyi dbyings). Through the process of reconstructing her identity, the practitioner is able to see herself as the ultimate source of offerings for all sentient beings.

One of the positive side-effects of maintaining a very high degree of awareness of death is that it will prepare the individual to such an extent that, when the individual actually faces death, he or she will be in a better position to maintain his or her presence of mind. Especially in Tantric Buddhism, it is considered that the state of mind which one experiences at the point of death is extremely subtle and, because of the subtlety of the level of that consciousness, it also has a great power and impact upon one’s mental continuum. In Tantric practices we find a lot of emphasis placed on reflections upon the process of death, so that the individual at the time of death not only retains his or her presence of mind, but also is in a position to utilize that subtle state of consciousness effectively towards the realization of the path. From the Tantric perspective, the entire process of existence is explained in terms of the three stages known as ‘death’, the ‘intermediate state’ and ‘rebirth’. All of these three stages of existence are seen as states or manifestations of the consciousness and the energies that accompany or propel the consciousness, so that the intermediate state and rebirth are nothing other than various levels of the subtle consciousness and energy. An example of such fluctuating states can be found in our daily existence, when during the 24-hour day we go through a cycle of deep sleep, the waking period and the dream state. Our daily existence is in fact characterized by these three stages. As death becomes something familiar to you, as you have some knowledge of its processes and can recognize its external and internal indications, you are prepared for it. According to my own experience, I still have no confidence that at the moment of death I will really implement all these practices for which I have prepared. I have no guarantee! Sometimes when I think about death I get some kind of excitement. Instead of fear, I have a feeling of curiosity and this makes it much easier for me to accept death. Of course, my only burden if I die today is, ‘Oh, what will happen to Tibet? What about Tibetan culture? What about the six million Tibetan people’s rights?’ This is my main concern. Otherwise, I feel almost no fear of death. In my daily practice of prayer I visualize eight different deity yogas and eight different deaths. Perhaps when death comes all my preparation may fail. I hope not! I think these practices are mentally very helpful in dealing with death. Even if there is no next life, there is some benefit if they relieve fear. And because there is less fear, one can be more fully prepared. If you are fully prepared then, at the moment of death, you can retain your peace of mind. I think at the time of death a peaceful mind is essential no matter what you believe in, whether it is Buddhism or some other religion. At the moment of death, the individual should not seek to develop anger, hatred and so on. I think even non-believers see that it is better to pass away in a peaceful manner, it is much happier. Also, for those who believe in heaven or some other concept, it is also best to pass away peacefully with the thought of one’s own God or belief in higher forces. For Buddhists and also other ancient Indian traditions, which accept the rebirth or karma theory, naturally at the time of death a virtuous state of mind is beneficial.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

The great bliss state is the state of reality – where we actually are, right here and now. It is not some elaborate place far away from where we are. The wonderful thing about the Buddha‘s revelation, the Buddha‘s insight, is that this reality itself is the great bliss state, that which he first called „Nirvana“, the extinction of all suffering, which he came to describe as „bliss void indivisible.“ The extinction of suffering and the achievement of perfect happiness and the reality of perfect happiness is the reality of our world. This was the Buddha‘s good news. This is what he realized under the bodhi tree, where he first became enlightened. The bodhi tree was the original wish-granting gem tree. To find happiness or peace or enlightenment, we do not have to create some artificial world, a world apart from this world. We have to understand the nature of this world. And the nature of this world, when we do understand it, is revealed to us through our understanding, not from some other person just showing us something. Our own understanding reveals the nature of the world to us as the great bliss state of emptiness and openness. The nature of this world is superbliss, intertwined and indivisible.

Remember that awakening, freedom from suffering, salvation, if you will, liberation, omniscience, buddhahood, all come from your own understanding, your insight into your own reality [...] The highest meaning of Dharma is the reality that is our own reality – the reality that holds us in freedom from suffering, holds us in a state of bliss. Dharma is our own reality that we seek to understand fully, to open to fully. Dharma, therefore, also consists of those methods and the teaching of those methods that are the art and sciences that enable us to open ourselves [...] Ultimately, we take refuge in reality itself, because that is the only secure refuge. If we took refuge in any unrealistic thing, it could be blown down by this-and-that howling wind - but when we take refuge in reality, that is what endures. It is uncreated. It is not made by anyone. It lasts. It is there, and therefore it can give refuge.

The Buddha‘s life is not just something in a historical past, with us left behind and lost here. The Buddha is not meant to be envisioned as a presence whom we will encounter in some world in the future. We should, rather, make the Buddha immediate for ourselves. We should connect ourselves to the Buddha‘s immediate presence in our minds, intentions, and actions. We do not just aim to emulate or admire the Buddha, the ancient saints, and bodhisattvas. We aim to become buddhas today, saints today, bodhisattvas today, at our level of ability. (p. 39)

Taking and giving meditation (tong len) Tong len is a foundational meditation in Tibetan Buddhism in which we envision taking away the suffering of others and giving them happiness. There are many different versions of this meditation. The following is a very simple version, and no less powerful because of that. Adopt the optimal meditation posture—remember to keep a straight back. Take a few deep breaths and exhale. As you do, imagine you are letting go of all thoughts, feelings and experiences. As far as possible try to be pure consciousness, abiding in the here and now. Begin your meditation with the following motivation: By the practice of this meditation, may NAME of PET and all living beings be immediately, completely and permanently purified of all disease, pain, sickness and suffering. May this meditation be a direct cause for us to attain enlightenment, For the benefit of all living beings without exception. Focusing on your in-breaths, imagine that you are inhaling radiant, white light. This light represents healing, purification, balance and blissful energy. Imagine it filling your body, until every cell is completely permeated with it. Keep on breathing like this, with the focus on the qualities of the light that you inhale. After some minutes, change the focus of your attention to your exhalations. Visualise that you exhale a dark, smoke-like light. The darkness represents whatever pain, illness or potential for illness, negativity of body, speech or mind you experience. With each out-breath imagine you are able to release more and more of this negativity. Keep on breathing like this, with the focus on the qualities of the light that you exhale. After some minutes, combine the two, so that you are both letting go of negativity and illness as well as breathing in radiant wellbeing. Now that you have some practice, imagine that you are inhaling and exhaling these qualities on behalf of your pet/s. Whatever you breathe in, you direct into their being. Whatever you exhale, you do so on their behalf. You are a conduit for healing energy, and for letting go of all suffering. Make this the main focus of your meditation session—the taking away of your pet’s sickness and suffering and the giving of purification, healing and wellbeing. You may decide to assign, say, three or four breaths to each of the following qualities to give structure to your meditation: In-breaths Out-breaths Taking in healing energy Getting rid of all physical and mental disease Complete purification/cleansing/healing All physical sickness/pain/suffering Radiant wellbeing—energy and vitality All mental negativity/distress/anxiety Peace, balance, mental tranquillity Hatred, craving and all delusions Love and compassion End the session as you began: By the practice of this meditation, may NAME of PET and all living beings be immediately, completely and permanently purified of all disease, pain, sickness and suffering. May this meditation be a direct cause for us to attain enlightenment, For the benefit of all living beings without exception.

The Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet certainly does contain an unbroken oral tradition of teachings on the development of supernormal powers, which has passed from realized guru to disciple from the time of the Buddha himself down to the present ...

The root of all that exists, Samsara and nirvana, is one's own mind. Primordially, mind is emptiness. Merge into the sky-like absolute expanse, Empty, luminous, beyond clinging. Outside, inside; eyes open or closed, Day, night; asleep or awake: No difference. During practice, after practice, Mind, appearances: Blend them. Continuously, without wavering, Merge completely with this vibrant, sky-like state.

There’s a very strong connection between the body and the mind. In Tibetan tantric yoga, we take advantage of that strong connection: by concentrating strongly on the body’s psychic channels we can affect the mind accordingly. Therefore, even in everyday life, the food you eat and the other things your body touches have an effect on your mind.

To end suffering - not only by relieving its symptoms but by eradicating its root cause - is precisely the aim of the Buddha's teaching. We must first realize that the true cause of suffering is not outside, but inside. That is why true spiritual practice consists of working on one's own mind. The mind is very powerful. It can create happiness or suffering, heaven or hell. If, with the help of the Dharma, you manage to eliminate your inner poisons, nothing from outside will ever affect your happiness, but as long as those poisons remain in your mind, you will not find the happiness you seek anywhere in the world. (Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche)

The external teacher figure in Tibetan Buddhism is considered more of a friend than a mentor. Your esoteric teacher, by contrast, is one you imagine and visualize to be indivisible from the Buddha himself, someone who is a living exemplar of enlightenment. You use your mental power of imagination to propel you toward the enlightened state, to mobilize you to become like your teacher. This altered focus makes the teaching more accessible and immediate. It gives you a personal guide from the outset, a companion on the path but one who is always ahead of you, motivating you. The mentor figure empowers you, not just to play at self-transformation but actually to realize the teaching, to experience the higher goal state. Thus, „mentor devotion“ is a practice of acknowledging or worshiping the Buddha in a model figure of your choice. (p. 9)

Through the great bliss state, I myself become the mentor deity. From my luminous body, Light rays shine all around, Massively blessing beings and things, Making the universe pure and fabulous, Perfection in its every quality. (p. 10)

We recognize that this moment is everything. The seed of our being, all our future states, the product of all our past states, infinity stretching in both directions, infinite expanses in both directions, is now here in this moment, and this moment begins to become more and more infinite. We find more and more fruition in this moment, especially when we know already how deeply wonderful the human life is. We see what a great opportunity for freedom this life is, especially since each moment of it could be the last. What is essential in each moment is the quintessential experience of that moment. When we know this in the deepest part of the soul, then we begin to have a soul life. We begin to have soul intensity in life.

The first two steps of the path: the recognition of the preciousness of human life, which is endowed with liberty and opportunity, and the awareness of the immediacy of death. (p. 79)

We are being developed by what we have done, and what we do, not only physically and verbally, but mentally also. What we now do in mind and speech and body will determine how we will become. The different forms and idiosyncrasies of all beings and things – all worlds in fact – depend on this inexorable causality of evolutionary action, or karma. Karma is not mysterious. Karma doesn‘t mean „fate“, although in a way it occupies the place of fate. Karma means „evolution, evolutionary causality.“ (Pages 79-80)

Now, we come to the heart of the Buddhadharma, to compassion. If you wanted to say in one word what is the essence of Buddha‘s teaching, of the enlightenment teaching, it would be compassion. The statement of Nagarjuna, the great master of two thousand years ago in India, crystallized this. He said, „Voidness is the womb of compassion.“ In Sanskrit this reads, shunyata karuna garbham; in Tibetan, tong nyid nying jey nying po jen, which may be the most beautiful phrase ever in Tibetan […] when we discover our freedom, this discovery flows immediately into universal compassion for all beings. (p. 111)

In a lovely statement in Maitreyanatha‘s Universal Vehicle Discourse Literature, the future buddha says, „There is not one buddha and there are not many buddhas. Buddhas are neither one nor many.“ You can‘t say there are many buddhas because all buddhas are one in the body of reality. They share the same body of reality, which is infinite and absolute. But you can‘t say there is only one buddha, because each individual being evolves to buddhahood and enjoys her or his own communion with all other buddhas in oneness. Each enjoys it individually, so in their form bodies, in their beatific bodies, all buddhas are distinct, so that your buddhahood does not somehow subsume my buddhahood. Shakyamuni‘s buddhahood doesn‘t prevent us from the joy of our own buddhahood, even though when we achieve our own buddhahood we realize we are one with Shakyamuni. We are the same being as Shakyamuni, yet we individually enjoy being the same being, each of us. Isn‘t that lovely? (p. 118)

Being in love with someone is wanting his or her happiness. It is not wanting to possess him or her for our happiness. That’s possessiveness and desire for control. But when we’re really in love with others, we want only their happiness. We forget about our happiness, and then, therefore, ironically, we get very happy, because we temporarily stop worrying about how happy we are. When we forget about how happy we are, we become happy. That’s why people like to be in love, because when they’re in love, they focus only on the beauty and the happiness of the beloved other. (p. 127)

Buddhism originated from its founding teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha, who gave 84,000 forms of teaching. Lam-rim means “stages of the path to enlightenment.” It was the great Indian master, Atisha, who wrote the first lam-rim text, A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, which condenses all 84,000 teachings into a single body of work. Atisha wrote this text in Tibet at the request of a Tibetan king. He then sent the text to India, where all the great realized scholars and mahasiddhas received it with praise and appreciation. It must be due to the good fortune and merit of the Tibetan people, they said, that Atisha had composed such a wonderful text.

Our manifesting mission is a White Op, a term based on the military black op, or black operation, a clandestine plot usually involving highly trained government spies or mercenaries who infiltrate an adversary‘s position, behind enemy lines and unbeknownst to them. White Op, coined by my best friend Bunny, stands for what I see needing to happen on the planet: a group of well-intentioned, highly trained Bodhisattva warriors (appearing like ordinary folk), armed with the six paramitas and restrained by ethical vows, begin to infiltrate their relationships, social institutions, and industries across all sectors of society and culture. Ordinary Bodhisattvas infusing the world with sacred view and transforming one mind at a time from the inside out until a new paradigm based on wisdom and compassion has totally replaced materialism and nihilism. The White Op is in large part how I envision the work and intention of my colleagues and me at the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science; we aspire to fulfill it by offering a Buddhist-inspired contemplative psychotherapy training program, infused with the latest neuroscience, to therapists, health-care workers, educators, and savvy business leaders. (p. 225)

One day we will feel the great winds and sky in all directions as our own breath; the streams, rivers, and oceans as our own veins, arteries, and blood; the natural habitats and continents as our own organs and body; and all sentient creatures and beings as our very own limbs. We will recognize the world is within us, and we are the world. With this recognition, having turned our hearts inside out, we will naturally work for the benefit of others and the planet (p. 227)

The final disappearing act of the great magician, the great medicine itself, is that a correct view of emptiness prevents even emptiness from being the final source of clinging. The point is that we have nothing to hold on to – not the world of forms and differentiation, not the formless realm of oneness, and not even the dissolving method of emptiness. „Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond, hail awakening“ as the Heart Sutra pronounces. (p. 204)

The Buddha said long ago that when anyone in the future met with his teachings, it would be the same as meeting him in person. Therefore we can “meet the Buddha” today in the form of teachers, teachings, or our own practice. Saying we want to meet the Buddha is like saying we want to meet the awakened state of our own mind. We don’t have to change who we are in order to meet the Buddha in this way. The purpose of our meeting is not to become a student of another culture or to discover someone else’s wisdom. We’re not practicing Indian culture to become Indian, or practicing Japanese or Tibetan culture to become Japanese or Tibetan. Our purpose is to discover who we truly are, to connect with our own wisdom.

Néyik reveal the underlying nature of the hidden-lands, but the qualities of the hidden-lands are by no means restricted to what is written. The most essential teachings in Tibetan Buddhism have never been written down.

That of the Theravāda is the only Abhidharma collection to survive in its entirety in its original Indian language. The Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma, originally composed in Sanskrit, survives only in Chinese and Tibetan translations. A brief analysis of the works of these two collections follows. THE BOOKS OF THE THERAVĀDIN ABHIDHAMMA PIṬAKA (a) Dhammasaṅganī, the ‘classification of things’ – listing and defining good, bad, and neutral mental states, and an analysis of material form. (b) Vibhaṅga, ‘analysis’ – offering a detailed analysis or classification of sixteen major topics of the Dharma, including the skandhas, nidānas, the elements, the faculties, mindfulness, bojjhaṅgas, jhānas, and insight. (c) Dhātukathā, ‘discussion of the elements’ – based on the skandha and āyatana analyses, and proceeding by means of questions and answers. (d) Puggalapaññati, ‘description of personalities’ – the analysis of human character types, by various factors that range in number from one to ten. (e) Kathāvatthu, ‘subjects of controversy’ – the refutation of the heterodox views of other Buddhist schools. (f) Yamaka, the ‘pairs’ – concerned with clear definition of terms. (g) Paṭṭhāna, ‘causal relations’ – a full discussion of pratītya-samutpāda.

Śāntideva quotes the Adhyāśaya-saṁcodana Sūtra on four qualities of a teaching by which it comes to be seen as the word of the Buddha: (a) It should be connected with the truth, (b) It should be concerned with the Dharma, (c) It should bring about renunciation of moral taints, (d) It should reflect the qualities of nirvāṇa, not saṁsāra.121 Rather than regarding the canon as being closed to further additions, in the way that the Tripiṭaka was supposed to have been at the First Council, the Mahāyāna clearly adopted an inclusive attitude, expressive of an openness to any teachings which were effective – itself a reflection of the new doctrine of upāya, ‘[skilful] means’ (see below). Some 600 Mahāyāna sūtras have survived to the present day, either in Sanskrit or in Tibetan and Chinese translations. In the following survey various groupings are suggested based on the nature of the teachings of the sūtras, but it should be borne in mind that, with only a few exceptions, these groupings were not self-conscious, and that many sūtras cut across any categories that are narrower than the general category of ‘Mahāyāna’.

Pemba and the other Sherpas began to prepare a ritual, with a meaning sunk deep in time. The pattern of the earliest rituals has always been for man to make an offering and, by giving, to achieve a receptive and aware state so as to become part of the interplay between himself, the earth and sky and the gods. When Buddhism came to Tibet in the seventh century, it was absorbed by the resident animist faith of many gods – the B’on religion. Today, the Sherpa religion, Tibetan Lamaism, is a thick mixture of the old animism, manifesting itself in mysticism, magic and demonolatry, overlaid by a layer of Buddhism. The earliest myth of the founding of Tibetan civilisation, concerns the building of the Samyang monastery, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet. The people, so the tale goes, worked very hard every day building the monastery, but every night evil demons came and destroyed their work. The people were making no progress at all, so they asked the Guru Rimpoche what to do. The Guru said it was no wonder they were having trouble, they weren’t making the gods happy, only spending a lot of money. When he taught them how to perform an offering ritual, the gods helped the people build the monastery, not only keeping away the demons, but also carrying the heavy things and working while the people slept, so that the building was completed in a very short time.

Another way of contemplating the virtues of Enlightened beings is to read accounts of their lives, whether the life of the Buddha himself or, say, that of Milarepa, the Enlightened yogi from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. One can also contemplate the spiritual qualities of the Buddhas by means of visualization exercises, as developed particularly in Tibetan Buddhism, by conjuring up a vivid mental picture, a sort of archetypal vision, of a Buddha or a Bodhisattva. What one does in these practices – to summarize very briefly – is to see this visualized form more and more brightly, more and more vividly, more and more gloriously, and then gradually feel oneself merging with it, one’s heart merging with the heart of the Buddha or Bodhisattva, the heart of Enlightenment. In this way one contemplates, one assimilates, one becomes one with, the virtues of the Tathagatas.

If you have adopted Buddhism you should not consider yourself a 'great Buddhist' and immediately start to do everything differently. A Tibetan proverb states, 'Change your mind but leave your appearance as usual.

In Japan, there is no question of the existence of ishin-denshin, a mutual understanding that arises through unspoken communication.  The word itself means “what the mind knows, the heart transmits” and suggests the same esoteric heart transmission as is found in Tibetan Buddhism.  There, the true understanding of the nature of reality cannot be communicated in words, and the understanding must instead be transmitted from the heart of the master to the student.  In Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff described the uncanny knowledge of Malaysian aboriginal tribes.  But in these cultures, psychic ability is not a goal to be strived after.  Instead, it is merely a fact of living.

One central question here is whether there is any true separation between life and death, or whether it all unfolds in, and is somehow shaped by, our intimacy with and within the gap.

Death is a natural part of life, which we will all surely have to face sooner or later. To my mind, there are two ways we can deal with it while we are alive. We can either choose to ignore it or we can confront the prospect of our own death and, by thinking clearly about it, try to minimize the suffering that it can bring.

Practice had given my master a complete knowledge of what death is, and a precise technology for guiding individuals through it.

Since their mind is free from doubt and hesitation they regard the teachings as a precious, wish-fulfilling jewel. Perceiving the misery of samsaric activities as poison they exert themselves in practice for the sake of the future. Seeing the pursuits of this life as futile they have great fortitude and perseverance when trying to accomplish the unexcelled enlightenment. Such noble people who are untainted by the faults of competitive and ambitious craving for material gain and prestige are the sublime spiritual offspring of the victorious ones.

There is a dimension to the accumulation of merit that can only be called magical. We begin to exert ourselves in performing acts of kindness and love toward others. With the help of meditation, we begin to tone down some of our sharper and more aggressive edges. And strangely, the complexion of our world begins to change. We begin to find ourselves softer, more open, and more able to work our way through the extremes of our own self-absorption. And in the external world, we notice doors opening that had seemed firmly shut in the way of time, opportunities, and encouragement for practice. This change cannot be quantified. But it is also undeniable, as if the world had heard our attempts at helping others as itself a call for help; and as if the world responded with its own, much vaster outpouring of love.

Dilgo Khyentse. The Excellent Path to Enlightenment: Oral Teachings on the Root Text of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion, 1996.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is the understanding that each person is fundamentally good. There is not a story of the fall of Adam and Eve. There is no story of being born into sin. There is no shame of being human. Human Design looks at life through a similar lens as the Dalai Lama does. You are not bad. You are not deficient. Your incarnation is a precious human birth, as the Buddhists would say.

if someone told me they were interested in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Tibetan Buddhism, I would first tell them about the Bardo Thödol, and then I would direct them to read the larger body of work that it’s based on, which is Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation Through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones, and then I would tell them to read George Saunders.

dukkha, which is usually translated as “suffering,” can have other meanings. In Tibetan Buddhism, the word is sometimes slanted differently, she says. Instead of saying that life is suffering, they might say that life is tolerable. As in just barely.

Teaching the Dharma to people who are skilled in dry intellectual speculations and cling to mere words of sophistry will result in slandering the Dharma. By slandering the Dharma the slanderer will accumulate evil karma, and you yourself, by being angry, will also gather misdeeds. Thus both teacher and recipient will gather evil karma through the Dharma. There is no need for that. Do not make the profound instructions into a sales item but practice with perseverance in remote places and mingle your mind with the Dharma.

Here is the explanation of how buddhahood acts for the welfare of sentient beings. Numerous reflections of the sun appear on the surface of many waters without leaving behind the single circle of the sun. Similarly, the truly and completely Enlightened One, the dharmakaya, without leaving behind the equality of the innate nature, magically appears, through the sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya, in accordance with the particular inclinations of those to be tamed in a number as great as the infinite space. Although acting for the benefit of beings, the dharmakaya holds no conceptual thinking. For example, the sunlight does not conceive of benefiting beings. In the same way the two kayas hold no concepts of acting for the welfare of beings. The welfare of beings results from the power of aspiration.

All the teachings and training in Buddhism are aimed at that one single point: to look into the nature of the mind, and so free us from the fear of death and help us realize the truth of life.

In this modern age, people find it difficult to believe that human beings are able to fly, but such things were very common in ancient times when people had strong potentialities for spiritual attainments. Milarepa, who was a great practitioner of Heruka and Vajrayogini, at one time – as explained in his life story – told a large assembly of his disciples how he had gained the ability to fly. Through various methods, including his tummo meditation, he had released the central channel knots at his heart, navel and below the navel, and because of this he developed a very special physical suppleness that pervaded his body. This made his body extremely light, like a soft feather. At first he could only levitate but gradually he was able to move through space until finally he was able to fly like an eagle.

In contrast, the Indian and Tibetan yogic traditions claim to provide detailed accounts of the transformations of consciousness during the dying process. Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, offers a rich contemplative perspective on death, including meditations to prepare for death and to practice as one dies. This kind of experiential view of dying and death is missing from the biomedical perspective. Nevertheless, we might wonder exactly how these yogic traditions, rooted in foreign cultures and belief systems, can help us to recover an experiential approach to death in our modern Western context.

As understood in Tibet, the king’s particular function is to join heaven and earth. Heaven refers to the sphere of spiritual truth and reality, includ­ing the world of unseen beings as well as the realm of ultimate reality itself. Earth is the realm of practicality. The king, then, is supposed to provide the connecting link, bringing spiritual reality down and making it real in this world. He is to rule over human society in such a way that it reflects and respects “the ways things are” in the largest sense. Tibetans say that their first kings originated in the mists of prehistory. Originally, these rulers were sacred beings who came from heaven and returned there at the end of their lives.

The Bodhicharyāvatāra has been widely acclaimed and respected for more than one thousand years. It is studied and praised by all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. I myself received transmission and explanation of this important, holy text from the late Kunu Lama, Tenzin Gyaltsen, who received it from a disciple of the great Dzogchen master, Dza Patrul Rinpoche. It has proved very useful and beneficial to my mind.

The nature of mind is just too close to be recognized. Just as we are unable to see our own face, mind finds it difficult to look into its own nature. 2.

Shamatha and Vipashyana sometimes get confused due to the different usage of the terminology in Pali and Sanskrit etc. Sometimes Shamatha is Vipashyana and sometimes Vipashyana is Shamatha, but in Tibetan Shamatha is Shamatha and Vipashyana is Vipashyana. You would expect me to say that because I’m a Tibetan right? Shamatha for us is the first step, it is where you make your mind calm, and Vipashyana is the second step, where you observe and maintain that calm-abiding state of mind, clearly. Therefore, Shinay or Shamatha is first, and Vipashyana or Lhagthong is later. If you don’t have a calm-abiding state of mind, then what are you going to observe? You are going to observe your confused state of mind; not necessarily confused in a negative sense, but busy, chaotic, and then that will naturally lead to a neurotic state of mind. That is why Shinay comes first and Lhagthong is later in Vajrayana Buddhism, and especially in Mahamudra practice.

***Not Religious October 31, 2017 I am an ordained Lama of the Celtic Buddhist lineage, a multi-decade student of many great Tibetan Buddhist teachers, a student of Brahmin/Hindu, Taoist, Wiccan, Animist and other traditions, a daily practitioner of sitting and moving meditations, with earlier roots in Judeo-Christian mysticism. I have recently faced enough folks remarking about what a “religious” person I am that it warrants a response. My response is, “Sorry. That’s just not true and pretty close to nonsense.” It is a very understandable mistake, my friends. I appreciate that you mean it as a compliment and I love you for the very kind intention. But who I am has somewhere between very little and nothing at all to do with the standard definitions of “religious.” I very highly recommend that you see the Why Celtic Buddhism Is Not A Religion section on the CB Homepage at celticbuddhism.org for clarification. I don’t disparage anyone who is religious (as long as they don’t use their religion as an excuse to kill, subjugate, demean or otherwise hurt anyone!) but for myself, it is not a label that fits. Be well, amigos. Much love, Ten (Lama Tenzin Roisin Dubh) p.s. Buy and read one or both of the two books at this Fearless Puppy website, or at Amazon. I say this for your benefit, not mine.

I think one of the big opportunities in the spread of Buddhism to the West is that Western students of Buddhism, especially in its Tibetan form, now have the chance to take a fresh look at the original Indian and Tibetan sources and to reevaluate the various Indo-Tibetan controversies without immediately getting caught up in centuries-long entrenchments of sectarian polemics. Fortunately, some signs of such a development are to be found.

By the power of this, may the obstacles of those great beings who are doctrine holders be dispelled!!! May the lives of those who adhere to the teachings be prolonged and may benefactors power increase! May sentient being be joyfully happy and always practice the Dharma! May the fruit of benefiting oneself and other ripen like that of a wish~fulfilling tree! May good deeds and enlightened activity PROLIFERATE and be auspicious! I wrote this myself. May virtue prevail! May virtue prevail! May virtue and excellence prevail!

We gain true friends by having a kind heart and not deceiving people. The friends that we make when we have power, position, and influence are friends based only upon our power, influence, and position. When we meet with misfortune and lose our wealth, these so-called friends leave us behind.

As Buddhagosa explained in the Visuddhimagga, nothing solid continues after death, yet one moment of consciousness gives rise to the next. After the physical elements disintegrate, unless one has achieved a very high level of spiritual attainment and can consciously determine one's next state of existence, rebirth takes place as a result of karma and delusions. In line with the earlier Buddhist teachings, Tibetan scholars rejected the idea of a self that continues after death, yet they accepted the idea of a very subtle consciousness that continues into an intermediate state between death and the next life.

Meditation is not something that you can “do”; it is something that has to happen spontaneously, only when the practice has been perfected. However,

If you nourish your hatred and your anger, you burn yourself. Understanding is the only way out. If you understand, you will suffer less, and you will know how to get to the root of injustice. . . . When you are a victim of injustice, if you get angry, you will suffer one hundred times more.

Tibetan Buddhism teaches that suffering is a feeling that our wishes are not being fulfilled. Or that no one is listening to us or does what we expect them to do.

That is to say, attachments to signs of accomplishment (drod rtags) and circumstantial effects are precisely what are called Negative Forces [demons].

The extraction of discrete parts of Chöd teachings from their broader philosophical contexts is symptomatic of how Chöd has been incorporated into and transmitted through other Tibetan Buddhist lineages. For example [...] Chöd practices gradually merged with pre-existing models of deity yoga, such the Vajrayoginī practices within Nyingma, Kagyü, and Geluk traditions. Fundamental Chöd practices such as those described in The Common Eightfold Supplementary Section do not tend to involve the kind of deity visualization common to *anuttaratantra practices, but many Mahāmudrā Chöd practices have been reconciled with other lineages through the employment of such visualizations. The incorporation of Chöd by the Geluk and Kagyü schools has thus had equivocal results: on the one hand, fragments of Chöd teachings are preserved, but on the other, the distinctiveness of Chöd is diminished in the service of different fundamental standpoints such as that of Mahāmudrā.

Our ancient sources of wisdom call on human beings to rise to their highest capacity and behave in extraordinarily open and generous ways to one another, under difficult circumstances to transcend differences and create understanding across all barriers of convention and fear. This wisdom is fragile as our environment is fragile, threatened by an overwhelming material culture. I believe in a spiritual ecology. In today’s world, Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions are endangered species.

The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by one's own thoughts.

Nothing exists in isolation. In fact, all beings and phenomena exist only because of their relationship with other beings or phenomena.

Machik thus maintains that what is conventionally referred to as a "god" is in fact the positive nature of reflexive awareness that characterizes the full potential of the enlightened mind when it is unsullied by discriminative thinking. In contrast, when "demons" are conventionally invoked, one should understand this as the obstruction of the full potential of the Universal Base [kun gzhi; ālaya] by non-aware emotional reactions (nyon mongs; kleśa).

Chöd is conventionally and misleadingly seen as analogous to, if not derived from, shamanic initiatory dismemberment visions, as well as dualistic anti-body ascetic practices. Two of the elements most commonly referenced by authors in their "identification" of Chöd and/as shamanism—the dismemberment/sacrifice of the body and "demonology"—are presented in an oversimplistic fashion. In the first instance, the numerous Buddhist precursors for the offering of the body provide ample testimony to the ethical and meritorious status such acts have in the Buddhist imagination. As for the "demonology" of Chöd, one must keep in mind the psychology and philosophy of mind that explicitly undergirds the discourse of Düd [Skt: mārā] in Chöd.

...the Chöd teachings attributed to Machik Labdrön both rely and innovate on Buddhist representations of mental functionings of a human being, including the onto-epistemological trope of the Universal Base Consciousness [ālaya-vijñāna] and the psycho-ethical trope of Negative Forces as Düd [bdud, māra, demon]. By drawing on and revising these traditional models, Chöd is able to develop effective techniques for "cutting through mind.

T he United States is the first, and perhaps only, country in the world in which every Buddhist sect is represented. Although

You can go on believing or not believing in God as you see fit. He, She, or They do not enter the Buddhist equation. Nonviolence

If you want to understand the causes that existed in the past, look at the results as they are manifested in the present. And if you want to understand what results will be manifested in the future, look at the causes that exist in the present. Life,

These four noble truths are the truth of suffering, the truth of its origin, the truth of cessation and the path leading to cessation.

Each moment provides an opportunity to turn toward awakening; and we are more likely to take advantage of each moment once we accept that these moments are limited.

We can learn to return home to our open hearts at any moment.

In Tibetan Buddhism, taking a root lama creates a sort of indelible connection to a teacher that can’t be erased by any sort of worldly action. The vows of obedience work on the spiritual plane and form a connection that persists in all future rebirths. It entails total submission to the will of another person, and complete trust that they will give you the tools you need to progress spiritually. From the moment she took the vows, McNally gave away control of her own life.

What sets Tibetan Buddhism apart from other Buddhist traditions—such as the Zen Buddhism of Japan or the Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka—is that while Tibetans aim to become enlightened, they don’t want to enter Nirvana.