Tibetan Buddhist Quotes

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.

Self-actualization is not a sudden happening or even the permanent result of long effort. The eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarupa suggested: "Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life." A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.

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.

No sane person fears nothingness.

Our lives have no outcome other than death, just as rivers have no end other than the ocean. At the moment of death, our only recourse is spiritual practice, and our only friends the virtuous actions we have accomplished during our lifetime.

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.

As a Buddhist, I view death as a normal process, a reality that I accept will occur as long as I remain in this earthly existence. Knowing that I cannot escape it, I see no point in worrying about it. I tend to think of death as being like changing your clothes when they are old and worn out, rather than as some final end. Yet death is unpredictable: We do not know when or how it will take place. So it is only sensible to take certain precautions before it actually happens.

Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunlight in a cave facing north. —Tibetan saying

Are, however, 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 US: the absence of resentment and envy, deep indifference towards the non-believer's way of life.

Dreams are a reservoir of knowledge and experience yet they are often overlooked as a vehicle for exploring reality. In the dream state our bodies are at rest, yet we see and hear, move about and are even able to learn. When we make good use of the dream state it is almost as if our lives were doubled: instead of a hundred years we live to be two hundred -- Tibetan Buddhist Tarthang Tulku from

My maroon robes, yellow shirt, and shaved head identified me as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a lama by profession—a perfect disguise for the disorderly mix of curiosity, anxiety, and confidence that accompanied my every heartbeat—and who in so many ways was still seeking the answer to my father’s question: Who is Mingyur Rinpoche?

Mindfulness should guide all your actions and your spiritual endeavors. Whatever you do, always apply three essential points: undertake the action with the intention of doing so for the good of all beings; execute it with perfect concentration, free of attachment to concepts of subject, object, and action; and, finally, dedicate the merit you have created to the enlightenment of all beings.

What a waste of time it is to take so much care of this body, feeding it the most succulent dishes, dressing it in the most fashionable clothes, and trying to make it look younger than it really is. The body has no other destination than the cemetery where it will be burned, buried, or fed to the birds.

Tibetan Buddhists say that a person should never get rid of their negative energy, that negative energy transformed is the energy of enlightenment, and that the only difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. If we stop struggling and open up and accept what is, that neurotic energy naturally arises as wisdom, naturally informs us and becomes our teacher.

Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all? 

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.

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].

We have one impermanent experience, and, unable to be at peace as it passes, we reach out and grab for another, The Tibetan Buddhist tradition defines renunciation as accepting what comes into our lives and letting go of what leaves our lives. To renounce in this sense is to come to a state of simple being.

Abandon any hope of fruition. The key instruction is to stay in the present. Don’t get caught up in hopes of what you’ll achieve and how good your situation will be some day in the future. What you do right now is what matters. Pema Chödrön, Tibetan Buddhist nun and resident teacher of Gampo Abbey, Nova Scotia

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.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once pointed out, “If you put one hundred percent of your heart into facing yourself, then you connect with this unconditional goodness. Whereas, if you only put fifty percent into the situation, you are trying to bargain with the situation, and nothing very much will happen.

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).

Someone who has managed to build up a great fortune may look back at his achievements with some satisfaction, reflecting proudly, “I am a rich man.” But he would do well to reflect, too, on the extent to which those riches are based on lies, deceit, and the overriding of others’ interests—negative actions that in the long run will only engender suffering.

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?

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.

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

As Tibetan Buddhists remind us, “If we take care of the minutes and moments, the hours and days will take care of themselves.

what Tibetan Buddhists call “the inability to bear the sight of another’s sorrow,” so that we feel it almost as intensely as we feel our own. We

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.

Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you. When you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.

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.

Many of us lead family lives. At most, the members of a family stay together for the duration of a lifetime, often much less. While that fleeting moment of being together still lasts, we should try to remain in perfect harmony with each other, while observing the Dharma as much as possible. Night and day, let us turn our minds toward goodness, love, and compassion.

Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and being (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, and so on. The result of such stances is what one should expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. [T]his constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. What this implies is that terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, are not really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term--what they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: 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 found 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. 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 and fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. The passionate intensity of a fundamentalist mob bears witness to the 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 would be if he felt threatened by, say, a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper? Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identify 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 makes them more furious and feed their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite: the fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.

The simplicity of mindfulness belies its profundity. It is the gateway to immortality. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master and best-selling author, said in his book The Joy of Living: “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

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.

The ancient Greeks named about five hundred gods, the Romans five thousand, the Tibetan Buddhists nine million, but Americans are the most polytheistic people in history: they have named 330 million gods. That is the root of our insanity. We demand to be our own authorities because we demand to be the authors of our own being and meaning

The Brahmin Upagupta, who lived during the time of the Buddha, used to sharpen his vigilance and measure his progress by keeping a daily account. Every evening, he would make two heaps of stones, using a black pebble for each bad thought or action he had committed during the day and a white stone for each meritorious one. At first, the heap of black pebbles would be much higher, but little by little, the two heaps became equal. With great perseverance, he eventually reached a point where all the stones he piled up were white.

One with compassion is kind even when angry; one without compassion will kill even as he smiles. SHABKAR, TIBETAN POET

The Tibetans do not mourn for the dead in our sense of the word. Sorrow for the parting is relieved by the prospect of rebirth, and death has no terrors for the Buddhist.

The best time to practice, the best time to prepare for the reality of death, and the best time to clarify our own Dharma Visions, is the present. Don’t waste a moment.

I often think of the words of the great Buddhist master Padmasambhava: "Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn't it far too late?" What more chilling commentary on the modern world could there be than most people die unprepared for death, as they have lived, unprepared for life?

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.

Unrecognized thought is the daytime equivalent of falling asleep. Each discursive thought is a mini-daydream. Drifting off into mindless thinking is how we end up sleepwalking through life—and therefore death.

In yantra yoga (the Buddhist Tibetan variation of hatha yoga), nauli is mentioned not as a shatkarma practice for balancing doshas, but rather as a mudra with the purpose of directing prana into the sushumna channel.

When I speak about love and compassion, I do so not as a Buddhist, nor as a Tibetan, nor as the Dalai Lama. I do so as one human being speaking with another. I hope that you at this moment will think of yourself as a human being rather than as an American, Asian, European, African, or member of any particular country. These loyalties are secondary. If you and I find common ground as human beings, we will communicate on a basic level.

Scientists have discovered that every cell in the human body also contains an electrical charge. Tibetan Buddhist monks who practice the Bön tradition of Tum-mo meditation have learned to focus these cellular charges to warm their bodies during bitterly cold winters. Researchers in England have discovered that by controlling the output of cellular charges in our bodies, humans can not only create heat but treat many chronic diseases.

A prayer or chant is a way of creating an imprint in your mind to one day perceive and experience something favorable. It's a way of actively settling aspiration through a process of cultivation and familiarization. What you think you become.

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.

Beings living in the modern, degenerate age are continually tormented by five lethal poisons and drunk on the five sense objects following after fleeting worldly phenomena; distracted by unattainable worldly actions; believing that the insubstantial is substantial.

He sought to create a single alphabet that could be used to write all the languages of the world. He assigned this task to the Tibetan Buddhist lama Phagspa, who in 1269 presented the khan with a set of forty-one letters derived from the Tibetan alphabet. Khubilai Khan made Phagspa’s script the empire’s official script, but rather than force the system on anyone, he allowed the Chinese and all other subjects to continue using their own writing system as well in the hope that the new script would eventually replace the old by showing its superiority.

Then, he spoke these final words, “At the moment of death, the ability to abide in the nature of mind, the indivisible three kayas—with its empty essence, clear nature and all-pervasive compassion—is extremely important.” He spoke the seed syllable AH while seated in the vajra posture and then passed away.

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.

The doctor paused, thought for a moment, and then said, “That is a good question. Sometimes evil knows that people will promptly reject evil, so it disguises itself as good and then attacks good as if it were evil. In the confusion, evil can accomplish its mission. Does that make sense?” For me as a Buddhist, this actually did make sense.

There is a metaphor in the Tibetan texts that says that one who receives teachings but does not gain experience through practice is like a farmer who doesn’t tend his own fields—even as he constantly tells others how they should tend theirs. People today receive many teachings, but at the time of death have they gained enough experience to die well?

Buddhist scholar Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, states, “Believing fundamentally that this life is the only one, modern people have developed no long-term vision…. So there is nothing to restrain them from plundering the planet for their own immediate ends and from living in a selfish way that could prove fatal for the future.

And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

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

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.

Plodding slowly up the last few steps to the summit, I had the sensation of being underwater, of life moving at quarter speed. And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

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.

Padampa stayed for a long time in the high valley of Tingri, on the frontier between Tibet and Nepal. Among his innumerable disciples, four were particularly close to his heart. One day, one of these close students arrived in Tingri after a long absence and was so saddened to see how much the master had aged that he asked, “Sublime being, when you leave this world, you yourself, without doubt, will go from bliss to bliss; but what will become of us, the people of Tingri? In whom can we place our trust?” For Padampa, dying would indeed be no more than passing from one Buddha-field to another. But for his disciples, his death would mean never again seeing his face or hearing his voice. “In a year’s time,” he said, “here you will find the corpse of an old Indian hermit.” Their eyes filled with tears, and it was for them that Padampa taught these Hundred Verses of Advice. A year went by, and Padampa began to show signs of illness. When his disciples worried about his health, he told them laconically, “My mind is sick.” To their perplexity, he added, “My mind has blended with the phenomenal world.” He thus demonstrated that all dualistic perception had disappeared from his mind. “I do not know how to describe this type of disease,” he added with a serene sense of humor. “Bodily ills can be treated, but this is incurable.” He then fixed his gaze on the sky and passed away.

As a displaced community, Tibetans often speak of learning to look to the future without forsaking tradition. And as Tibetans continue their flight from Tibet to India or Nepal and then scatter farther and farther away from the physical land of Tibet, the conversations on identity and culture become more crucial and complex. As the distance increases so does the desperation in keeping Tibet as the eventual home, our aspired home. Yet it is the loss of Tibet and its very distance that also awakens us to view patriotism and identity in new ways that are not guided solely by Buddhist philosophy. Self-assertion- an approach avoided in the past because of the Buddhist aspiration to prevent focus on the self- enters our identity as Tibetans.

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

And it is a strange fact that in all these churches there is never a moment of quietness, except when it is empty. Because if you are quiet, you might inquire. If you are quiet, you might begin to doubt. But if you are occupied all the time, you never have time to look around, to question, to doubt, to ask. That may be one of the great tricks of the human mind. What is meditation and why should one meditate? Is it natural? Like breathing, like seeing, like hearing, is it natural? And why have we made it so unnatural? Taking postures, following systems of Buddhist meditation, Tibetan meditation, Christian meditation, Tantric meditations, and the meditations set by your favorite guru. Aren’t all those really abnormal? Why should I take a certain position to meditate? Why should I practice, practice, practice? To arrive where?

Here are pictures of the sources for Daoist mijue "master to disciple" oral teachings, as shown in the manuals used by Daoist masters themselves. The manuals are insufficient for the casual reader to use, the oral koujue explanations given on a personal one-to-one basis are essential. After seeing how Daoists from Longhu Shan,as well as foreign ("american") Dao for $$$ have falsified their use, I am reluctant to share them in full, until a true Qingwei or Zhengyi Grade five and above master ask to see them. The Qingwei (5 thunder-vajra") Daoist seen performing the purification mudra in image #5 below (a mudra shared by Daoists, Tendai Tantric Buddhists in Japan, and Tibetan masters) said when he had seen the manuals shown in pictures 1-4. "Where is the other half of the Thunder-Vajra manual?" Then I knew that it was OK to give it to him! He gave me his address in Jiangxi province; I intend to bring the mijue manual to him on my next trip to China, as Master Zhuang asked me to do, (before his death in 1976, an order given to his maternal great grandfather by the 61st Longhu Shan master, in 1868)! [Saso facebook post, May 7 2015]

I came across the writings of the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa. As a man, he was problematic. He drank too much, slept around, and didn’t live as we’d expect a great, wise teacher to live. But every teacher is human. Likewise, parents are not wise oracles—they’re just people trying to shepherd other people through the world. We may know the right path to take, but knowing the way and consistently walking it are two different things. Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect. Trungpa writes about torma and don. “Possession” is the closest translation for the Tibetan word don—a ghost that causes misfortune, anger, fear, sickness. When you have a don, you are the possession. The anger possesses—owns—you. Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand. When I read Trungpa, I thought about my own ghosts differently. Fear isn’t inside me, I’m inside it. Anger isn’t something I’m holding; it’s something that’s held me, possessed me. And being possessed is the opposite of being free.

It has been the strange fate of Tibet, once one of the most isolated places on earth, to function as a laboratory for the most ambitious and ruthless human experiments of the modern era: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and now a state-imposed capitalism. After having suffered totalitarian communism, Tibetans now confront a dissolute capitalism, one that seeks arrogantly, and often violently, to turn all of the world's diverse humanity into middle-class consumers. But it seems wrong to think of Tibetans, as many outsiders do, as helpless victims of large, impersonal forces. It is no accident that the Tibetans seem to have survived the large-scale Communist attempt at social engineering rather better than most people in China itself. This is at least partly due to their Buddhist belief in the primacy of empathy and compassion. And faced with an aggressively secular materialism, they may still prove, almost alone in the world, how religion, usually dismissed, and not just by Mao, as "poison," can be a source of cultural identity and moral values; how it can become a means of political protest without blinding the devout with hatred and prejudice; how it can help not only heal the shocks and pain of history- the pain that has led people elsewhere in the world into nihilistic rage- but also create a rational and ethical national culture, what may make a freer Tibet, whenever it comes about, better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies.

Most disconcerting of all were those experiences in which the patient's consciousness appeared to expand beyond the usual boundaries of the ego and explore what it was like to be other living things and even other objects. For example, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female prehistoric reptile. She not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species' anatomy she found most sexually arousing was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior knowledge of such things, a conversation Grof had with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. Patients were also able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors. One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing—all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before. Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.

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.

Chögyam Trungpa, a contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher, writes, “The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

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.

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)

There is a Tibetan Buddhist teaching that says what causes suffering in life is a general pattern of how we relate to others: “Envy toward the above, competitiveness toward the equal, and contempt toward the lower.

Popper's falsifiability thesis resonates with a major methodological principle in my own Tibetan Buddhist philosophical tradition. We might call this the "principle of the scope of negation." This principle states that there is a fundamental difference between that which is "not found" and that which is "found not to exist." If I look for something and fail to find it, this does not mean that the thing I am seeking does not exist. Not seeing a thing is not the same as seeing its non-existence.

This science of bringing incarnations was alive in adi shaiva tradition and even in tibetan buddhist tradition. Reincarnation is neither theory nor philosophy nor concept. It is a science.

Indian yogis train themselves to decrease the amount of air they take in at rest, not increase it. Tibetan Buddhists prescribed step-by-step instructions to reduce and calm breathing for aspiring monks. Chinese doctors two thousand years ago advised 13,500 breaths per day, which works out to nine and a half breaths per minute. They likely breathed less in those fewer breaths. In Japan, legend has it that samurai would test a soldier’s readiness by placing a feather beneath his nostrils while he inhaled and exhaled. If the feather moved, the soldier would be dismissed.

I was greatly impressed by Geshe-la's qualities-his personal solidity, the sharpness of his mind, his obvious mastery of his tradition-which were manifest in the crystal-clear teachings he gave.' I was also impressed by his confidence in the validity of his tradition, displayed in a readiness to discuss any question. Students could raise many questions, and Geshe-la always had an answer, usually a very good one, which he proposed on its own merits, not relying on the authority of the tradition or himself. Moreover, students, like grown-ups, were given the freedom to think for themselves. When they encountered difficult topics, such as reincarnation and karma, Geshe-la would advocate that they provisionally suspend judgment: "You will be able to form a better judgment later through more study and practice. For now, it does not matter; just go on studying and practicing." This attitude, which reflected a view that belief was not a precondition of religious engagement but rather derived from a reasoned inquiry into the tradition, contrasted favorably in my mind with the religious traditions I had been exposed to earlier.

My experience in meditation is not unique; it’s common to meditators throughout history. A 14th-century Tibetan mystic, writing about his experience deep in meditation, described it as: . . . a state of bare, transparent awareness; Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom; Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point; Spacious empty clarity, a state wide-open and unconfined; the senses unfettered . . . The mystical experience isn’t the property of Buddhists or Catholics or Taoists or Hindus. It’s the common root of all religions. The great spiritual teachers entered these experiential states, and when they “came back from the mountaintop,” described them to their followers in the idiom of their cultures.

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.

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.

The Root of Chinese Qigong — The Secrets of Qigong Training 2. Muscle/Tendon Changing and Marrow/Brain Washing Qigong — The Secret of Youth (Yi Jin Jing and Xi Sui Jing)() 3. Chinese Qigong Massage — Qigong Tui Na and Cavity Press for Healing (Qigong An Mo and Qigong Dian Xue)() 4. Qigong and Health — For Healing and Maintaining Health 5. Qigong and Martial Arts — The Key to Advanced Martial Arts Skill (Shaolin, Wudang, Emei, and others) 6. Buddhist Qigong — Chan, The Root of Zen() 7. Daoist Qigong (Dan Ding Dao Gong)() 8. Tibetan Qigong (Mi Zang Shen Gong)()

the word for “Buddhist” in Tibetan is nangpa. It means “inside-er”: someone who seeks the truth not outside, but within the nature of mind.

One of the greatest Buddhist traditions calls the nature of mind “the wisdom of ordinariness.

If my dying relative or friend is a practicing Christian and I am a Buddhist, is there any conflict?” How could there be? I tell them: You are invoking the truth, and Christ and Buddha are both compassionate manifestations of truth, appearing in different ways to help beings.

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.

The bordos and the Six Realms are the testing grounds for the mind of the deceased. It gives the consciousness that has been liberated from the physical body another chance to realize its essential nature. If this realization does not occur, the consciousness will resume its journey through the bardos. It will be reborn in one of the Six Realms and continue the karmic cycle until it discovers this truth.  Until then, the self-imposed limitations of sentient beings will prevent the Buddha’s guidance from liberating them.

The Tibetan Buddhist term for mind is sem, a word that may be translated into English as “that which knows.

It’s interesting that the word for “Buddhist” in Tibetan is nangpa. It means “inside-er”:

O Nobly Born, now there is born in you exceeding compassion for all those living creatures who have forgotten their true nature. —Mahamudra text of Tibetan yogi Longchenpa Overcome any bitterness because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain entrusted to you…. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, you are sharing in the totality of this pain and are called upon to meet it in compassion and joy instead of self-pity.

Buddhist classics and also composed authoritative commentaries on key texts. Chapa is remembered for his original views on logic and epistemology and for inventing the Tibetan system of dialectical debate.

Grant that I may be given appropriate difficulties and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion may be truly fulfilled. —Tibetan Buddhist prayer quoted by Jack Kornfield in A Path with Heart

If, on the other hand, I relate to others from the perspective of myself as someone different—a Buddhist, a Tibetan, and so on—I will then create walls to keep me apart from others.

Life is full of acceptance and rejection. Unfortunately, many of us focus on the rejection. Yoga tells us it’s more useful to practice swaha, the idea of which is do the best you can, and let go of the rest. Tibetan Buddhists often translate swaha as “so be it.” Swaha is the rudder that can help us maintain equilibrium. •

Compassionate rulers love their subjects as they would an only child. They care for their followers even at the cost of their own wealth and life.

Introduced to Tibet in the eighth century, Shāntarakshita’s Yogacārā-Madhyamaka synthesis flourished untroubled for about four hundred years. It was, as we have said, highly receptive to the logico-epistemological tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti; and the favor in which it was held at Sangpu could only have been strengthened by Loden Sherab’s translations of major logical texts in the twelfth century. Nevertheless, the supremacy of Shāntarakshita’s Madhyamaka tradition was challenged by the arrival in Tibet of Patsap Nyima Drak’s translations of Chandrakīrti. Having made so little impact in India, Chandrakīrti’s Madhyamaka teaching was completely new to most Tibetans, despite the fact that Atisha both knew and appreciated it. The novelty of Chandrakīrti, as compared with Shāntarakshita was, of course, illusory, in the sense that it depended on the date, not of the composition, but of the translation, of his works—Shāntarakshita’s synthesis being the more recent, indeed the last, major development in the history of Indian Buddhist thought. On the other hand, Chandrakīrti’s strong disapproval of the logico-epistemological tradition must have come as a shock in that it suddenly called into question what had come to be regarded as an integral component of the Madhyamaka tradition that was, by then, so well established. It was at this time that, as a means of conveniently labeling the two diverging approaches, the terms rang rgyud pa and thal ’gyur ba (back-translated into Sanskrit as “Svātantrika” and “Prāsaṅgika,” respectively) were coined.

***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.

The Sanskrit word samsara—which traditionally represents the summation of all our confusion and destructive patterns of behavior—literally means “wandering around.” The Tibetan word for a sentient being caught up in confusion—drowa—could be translated as “always on the go.” I like to think of this word as meaning “commuter.” From

O Nobly Born, now there is born in you exceeding compassion for all those living creatures who have forgotten their true nature. —Mahamudra text of Tibetan yogi Longchenpa

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.

Envision living in a culture not based upon fixed views. Imagine activities that do not stem from “I am”—not even “I am a Buddhist” or “I am a member of the culture of truth” or “I am Indian, Tibetan, or American.

In this age of global interrelatedness and hunger for meaning, it is incumbent upon persons driven by a need to find and manifest peace, to find that which is universal and practical at the core of all spiritual teachings. A Tibetan Buddhist can be enriched by the wisdom of the Christ just as a Christian can develop a deeper inner practice through a study of Islamic Mysticism. Our epoch can no longer accept the artificial walls that have stood for centuries between peoples and cultures. This is a new century, and there is no going back.

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.

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.

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,

If you die before you die, then when you die you will not die.” If you can “die,” or let go of your ego now, then when you physically die you will not die—because you’re already “dead.

On the surface one might think that if one simply concerns oneself with altruistic intent and future lifetimes, the practical aspects of this life will not be accomplished, and one will be a failure. This simply isn't true. On the contrary, when one really does renounce or let go of this lifetime everything is taken care of by force of the deeper motivation.

Philosophically speaking, from the Buddhist point of view, both human beings and animals possess what in Tibetan is called shepa, which can be roughly translated as “consciousness,” albeit to different degrees of complexity.

These two features—luminosity, or clarity, and knowing, or cognizance—have come to characterize “the mental” in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought. Clarity here refers to the ability of mental states to reveal or reflect. Knowing, by contrast, refers to mental states’ faculty to perceive or apprehend what appears.

HOW ARE TIBETAN BUDDHIST MANIPULATED WITHIN USA /NATO POLITICAL INTEREST THROUGH OBVIOUS JEWSS JAWSS BLACK MAGIC

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.

the Tibetan word for prayer translates as ‘wish path.

According to the Buddhist point of view, there is no human problem that cannot be solved by human beings.

Then I remembered a joke told by a Tibetan friend: “What is the difference between a Buddhist and a non-Buddhist?” The answer: “The non-Buddhist thinks there is one.

Many of us have become refugees,” the Dalai Lama tried to explain, “and there are a lot of difficulties in my own country. When I look only at that,” he said, cupping his hands into a small circle, “then I worry.” He widened his hands, breaking the circle open. “But when I look at the world, there are a lot of problems, even within the People’s Republic of China. For example, the Hui Muslim community in China has a lot of problems and suffering. And then outside China, there are many more problems and more suffering. When we see these things, we realize that not only do we suffer, but so do many of our human brothers and sisters. So when we look at the same event from a wider perspective, we will reduce the worrying and our own suffering.” I was struck by the simplicity and profundity of what the Dalai Lama was saying. This was far from “don’t worry, be happy,” as the popular Bobby McFerrin song says. This was not a denial of pain and suffering, but a shift in perspective—from oneself and toward others, from anguish to compassion—seeing that others are suffering as well. The remarkable thing about what the Dalai Lama was describing is that as we recognize others’ suffering and realize that we are not alone, our pain is lessened. Often we hear about another’s tragedy, and it makes us feel better about our own situation. This is quite different from what the Dalai Lama was doing. He was not contrasting his situation with others, but uniting his situation with others, enlarging his identity and seeing that he and the Tibetan people were not alone in their suffering. This recognition that we are all connected—whether Tibetan Buddhists or Hui Muslims—is the birth of empathy and compassion. I

You don’t have to be a philosopher; you just have to want to know who you are.” Padmasambhava, The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The archetype of the hero in Tibetan Buddhism is a Bodhisattva, an evolved being motivated by profound compassion for the suffering of others who vows to reach complete awakening. Bodhisattvas who pursue the Gradual Path follow a succession of training steps through stages of psychological development and reach specific milestones, or realizations, along the way to enlightenment. Both physicists discovering the ultimate nature of reality and poet-activists, Bodhisattvas generate love and compassion as practical and constructive forces to skillfully redesign the matrix of interdependence we all share.

I often refer to the great mythologist and American author Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) in this book. He used the designation of „hero“ to describe individuals who embark on the monumental psychological task of expanding and evolving consciousness and famously charted this journey. This hero‘s journey begins in our inherent state of blindness, separation, and suffering and progresses on a circular (as opposed to linear) route made up of stages shared by myths and legends spanning all cultures and epochs. From Buddha to Christ, Arjuna to Alice in Wonderland, the hero‘s journey is one of passing through a set of trials and phases: seeking adventure, encountering mentors, slaying demons, finding treasure, and returning home to heal others. Tibetan Buddhism‘s and Campbell‘s descriptions of the hero both offer a travel-tested road map of a meaningful life, a path of becoming fully human – we don‘t have to wander blindly, like college kids misguidedly hazed by a fraternity, or spiritual seekers abused in the thrall of a cult leader. The hero archetype is relevant to each of us, irrespective of our background, gender, temperament, or challenges, because we each have a hero gene within us capable of following the path, facing trials, and awakening for the benefit of others. Becoming a hero is what the Lam Rim describes as taking full advantage of our precious human embodiment. It‘s what Campbell saw as answering the call to adventure and following our bliss – not the hedonic bliss of chasing a high or acquiring more stuff, but the bliss of the individual soul, which, like a mountain stream, reaches and merges with the ocean of universal reality. (p. 15)

True refuge demands a complete and utter trust fall into the arms of reality. (p. 56)

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The great eleventh-century Nalanda pandit Lama Atisha understood this well, and with a mighty heart of wise compassion he set out to marshal the Buddha‘s eighty-four thousand teachings – found in hundreds of scriptures and thousands of verses – into a logical, sequential, and practical road map to help guide spiritual seekers on the path, from ordinariness to liberation on to full and final awakening. This unique style of teaching came to be called Lam Rim, or the Gradual Path to Enlightenment, and, attesting to its beauty and effectiveness, has been preserved in all lineages and schools of Tibetan Buddhism for the past thousand years. One of the unique features of the Lam Rim is that it recognizes an alternative to the path of sudden, spectacular enlightenment and instead proposes a more modest, gradual awakening. From the beginning of Tibet‘s history of receiving dharma transmission from India, with the great debates involving the eighth-century Indian scholar Kamalashila, it was clear that for the masses the gradual process of studying, contemplating, and embodying insights over the course of a sustained, lifelong practice would be most appropriate and beneficial. While all methods have their validity and are useful for practitioners of various dispositions, the gradual approach explained in these pages is as relevant to modern students as it was to Tibetans centuries ago. – Geshe Tenzin Zopa

According to Lama Je Tsongkhapa (1357-1419), the essence of the entire path to awakening can be distilled into three main realizations: renunciation, the mind that relinquishes distortions, afflictive emotions, and compulsions, as well as their unfavorable results; Bodhicitta, the mind set on awakening for the benefit of others; and wisdom, the mind that directly perceives the ultimate reality of emptiness and interdependence.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. SIR ISAAC NEWTON, letter to Robert Hooke, February 15, 1675

Enlightenment is possible – for everyone. However, I don‘t think we will all awaken spontaneously in the way contemporary spiritual teachers Krishnamurti or Eckhart Tolle did. Most of us will never experience a voice from on high, a flash of life-altering insight, stigmata, or a transcendent miracle. Anything is possible, but the odds are not in our favor. What these teachers experienced is like winning the lottery. Yet, from the Buddhist perspective, most of us have already won the lottery: against all probability, we have been born as human beings with intact senses and a bit of interest in pursuing something spiritual. This is even more remarkable when we consider the obstacles and temptations of our materialistic culture, in which spirit is thrown out with the bathwater of religious dogma, God is proclaimed dead, consciousness is reduced to epiphenomena of the brain, and life‘s purpose is made a hedonic scramble on a treadmill to nowhere. What is far more likely than sudden enlightenment is gradual awakening. Following a systematic educational process like a college curriculum, gradual awakening builds on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. This gradual process of awakening doesn‘t offer an escape hatch to another realm of reality or disavow our human wounds, limits, and foibles in this realm; rather it embraces and transforms them, because the only way out is through.

Much (if not all) of my spiritual growth was cultivated and punctuated by my encounters with a succession of incredible teachers. A qualified mentor is essential as we find our way from suffering to freedom, from spiritual darkness to the transcendent light of Divinity.

Refreshed, we rose before sunrise and walked in silence, spontaneously hand in hand, from the monastery, through the darkness, and down a dirt road to the Bodhi tree where the Buddha reached enlightenment. Sitting together in meditation under the branches, dawn broke to the resonance of monks chanting, an endless stream of prayers thousands of years old and echoing through the ages. That was the first time I came to know what the word love meant. The person, the place, and the moment all felt like finding home. It was pure magic.

In every one of us is a child who hopes myths, mysteries, and dreams can come true. They can, and they have. (p. 7)

Here‘s the good news: our brains are flexible and designed for learning and adaptation in a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, so we can reprogram at any time in the life span and make genuine, radical changes. With the right tools, a human being can travel the Lam Rim (the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment), from ordinary neurotic to extraordinary hero . . . all the way to a Buddha. (p. 77)

Start planting noble seeds and watch your life grow. (p. 119)

Your present life is just one life; future lives are innumerable. Do not sacrifice so many lives just to pursue the illusory well-being of this present one. If you neglect to practice Dharma day after day, you will regret it bitterly – but too late, at the moment of death. Can a dying person begin to practice? Right now is the time to devote yourself to spiritual practice. The experience that practice will bring you is the only thing that will help you at the hour of death. (The Hundred Verses of Advice – Collected Works Vol II p 424, Shambhala)

What you‘re experiencing now is conditioned and determined by your past; what you‘re doing now conditions and determines what you‘ll see in your future. When you can take responsibility for that causal process, you are on the first stage of the hero path. You change your piece of the world by changing your body and mind from that of an ordinary, deluded, sleepwalking, and afflicted human to that of a hero and eventually a Buddha – one who is utterly awake. Then you inspire others, until everyone‘s piece of the world is utterly, collectively transformed. (pp. 88 - 89)

Just as a snake sheds its skin, so too do we relinquish actions, words, and views that compose our current life of misery and longing so we can be reborn as a Bodhisattva Hero, a child of the Buddhas. Are you ready to let go? (p. 97)

the 25,000-foot peak of Gurla Mandhata; less striking, but far more famous, was the sacred Mount Kailas, 3,000 feet lower, which stands in majestic isolation apart from the Himalaya range. When we first caught sight of it our Tibetans prostrated themselves and prayed. For Buddhists and Hindus this mountain is the home of their gods and the dearest wish of all the pious is to visit it as pilgrims once in their lives.

As Campbell pointed out, in all spiritual traditions the hero must undergo initiation and testing. These rites of passage awaken and develop latent human capacities as they mark and safely ritualize the process of maturity, empowerment, and agency among members of a group. Initiation is a way adolescent naivete and dependency ends as we develop a sense of mastery, meaning, and purpose and are reborn as adults and active, contributing members of the tribe. Vision quests, shamanic journeys, sun dances, ordinations, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and confirmations offer access to a time-tested method steeped in a collective body of wisdom and community that mitigates risk and gives reproducible outcome. (p. 18) Regardless of time, place, or culture, the motifs and stages of every initiation are the same. Whether symbolic or actual they include leaving home or separating from the community, facing a symbolic or literal hardship that serves as a psychological catalyst for an altered state of consciousness, and awakening as the nascent hero. The process continues with integrating and embodying wisdom, sometimes with the help of elders, priests, or shamans, and returning to the community as a mature member, active contributor, or leader. Initiation hastens development so the latent hero nature can be realized. (p. 18)

We are missing an enormous opportunity if we deny ourselves a wholesome, mature reliance on those who have evolved to what we aspire to become. As Sir Isaac Newton urged, we can evolve best by standing on the shoulders of giants, getting closer to truth by building on the discoveries of those luminaries who came before us.

Frequenting evil friends is bound to make your own behavior evil; People of Tingri, abandon any friendships that are negative. – Padampa Sangye

We can sacrifice ourselves in order to save lives, to spread messages of freedom, hope, and dignity. That is our Buddha Nature, our Christ Nature – people who have embodied the principles of love and compassion and have taken extraordinary measures to change the world for the better. We call them heroes and heroines - for example, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai, along with the nameless aid workers, neonatal surgeons, and ordinary parents who make extraordinary choices in life-threatening circumstances. And we admire them. Those are the people who we want to occupy our Jewel Tree, letting their nectar rain down upon us in a shower of blessing and inspiration. They are the people who have discovered interdependence, wisdom, and compassion, have seen through the illusion of separation and come out the other side with the hero‘s elixir for the welfare of others. If we don‘t believe we can do it, if we don‘t have the confidence, that‘s the last hurdle. We believe there is something special about the hero and something deficient about us, but the only difference is that the Bodhisattva has training, has walked the Lam Rim, has reached the various milestones that each contemplation is designed to evoke, and collectively those experiences have brought confidence. Our natures are the same. It‘s in your DNA to become a hero. As heretical as it may sound to some, there is no inherent specialness to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is not inherently different from you. If you had his modeling, training, support, and devotional refuge, you too could be a paragon of hope and goodwill. Now, hopefully you will recognize cow critical it is for you to embrace your training (the Bodhisattva Path), so that we can shape-shift civilization through the neural circuitry of living beings. (pp. 139 - 140)

Love is the natural flow or outgrowth of the wisdom of oneness (p. 145)

If you neglect to protect your mind, you can neither close the door to suffering nor open the door to happiness.– Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Our hero's journey combines two arcs: the inward arc involving leaving home, slaying the demon, and gaining insight into selflessness, and the outward arc involving finding the treasure of compassion and returning home with the elixir. (p. 205)

The real guru is always within, and while we may need an external guide to serve as a mirror to reflect our highest potential, we should never abandon our innate common sense, intuition, emotions, and wisdom. (p. 163)

As we progress along the path we should adopt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is uniquely ours.

The way we relate to all of phenomena alters when our mind perceives phenomena as a process and expression of flow […] why does it matter? Because we realize we can‘t hold on to processes, just as we can‘t hold a stream of water. We can savor and skillfully work with dynamic things, but we can‘t control or own them. Meditate on this idea; it‘s healing. (p. 174)

Tibetan Kagyu foundation practices (ngöndro),

As soon as your object of concern changes from yourself to someone else, your heart is released from the bondage of the self-cherishing thought. As soon as you change the object of your cherishing, there is peace in your heart.

In the Khagga-Visāna-Sutta (24) of the Sutta-Nipāta, we read: One should associate with a friend who is learned, knows the teaching, has acquired and cultivates knowledge, has understood the meaning of things and has removed his doubts. The Hiri-Sutta (3) states: He who is constantly anxious and conflicted and always looks for flaws is not a friend. He who cannot be alienated from one by others, like a son from his father’s heart, is indeed a friend. Conventional friendship consolidates our conventional view of life, which is a flat perspective by contrast with the deep and unobstructed view inspired by spiritual friendship. Conventional friendship springs from and reinforces samsāra. Spiritual friendship is rooted in and promotes nirvāna. Beware also of dharma friends who bring worldliness to their spiritual practice. Their talk about spiritual matters is an occasion to brag, belittle others, or gain advantage—in other words, to cherish themselves. Their words are apparently about the path, but their mind is firmly entrenched in worldly matters. They are pretenders. Better to associate with a silent friend who is firmly on the path than a talkative friend who follows the pathways of the ego. Sat-sanga means “association with the virtuous or real.” Usually this refers to keeping the company of an adept, who embodies spiritual values, that is, connects us with that which is true, real, or virtuous (sat). In Buddhism, the word sangha or “community” suggests the same: the mutually beneficial association of those who follow the Buddha’s teachings (dharma). Members of the Sangha are by definition refuge holders, that is, they have sincerely taken refuge in the “three jewels” (tri-ratna): the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Taking refuge implies that we not merely believe in the “three jewels” but actively endeavor to follow in the footsteps of the Buddha and other great masters who have attained liberation or at least higher realizations by virtue of their own practice of the Buddha’s teachings. The greatest spiritual friend is one’s guru (Sanskrit) or lama (Tibetan). Some Buddhist schools consider him or her the fourth worthy object of refuge. He or she only has one’s best interest in mind, namely one’s ultimate freedom and happiness. The Buddhists call such a one kalyana-mitra or “beautiful friend.” He or she is “beautiful” because of his or her capacity and intent to beautify or ennoble others. Taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha is said to dispel all fear. Taking refuge in anyone or anything else does not have the same effect. It may postpone fear but cannot remove it altogether, because they do not lead us to our true nature, which is the Buddha nature beyond all possible worldly destinies. The Udāna-Varga (25.5) declares: People degenerate by relying on those inferior to themselves. By relying on equals, they stay the same. By relying on those superior, they attain excellence. Thus rely on those who are superior to yourself.

The two major branches of Buddhism are Theravada and Mahayana. Mahayana has several subsets that you may have heard of, like Zen, Tibetan, and Pure Land Buddhism. There is also an extension of Mahayana Buddhism called Vajrayana, which is sometimes referred to as a distinct, third branch of Buddhism. Theravada is the main form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, while Mahayana dominates in China, Japan, Taiwan, Nepal, Mongolia, Korea, and Vietnam. Vajrayana is the main form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet and the form that the Dalai Lama practices and teaches.

I think that this is the first time I am meeting most of you. But to me, whether it is an old friend or new friend, there’s not much difference anyway, because I always believe we are the same; we are all human beings. Of course, there may be differences in cultural background or way of life, there may be differences in our faith, or we may be of a different color, but we are human beings, consisting of the human body and the human mind. Our physical structure is the same, and our mind and our emotional nature are also the same. Wherever I meet people, I always have the feeling that I am encountering another human being, just like myself. I find it is much easier to communicate with others on that level. If we emphasize specific characteristics, like I am Tibetan or I am Buddhist, then there are differences. But those things are secondary. If we can leave the differences aside, I think we can easily communicate, exchange ideas, and share experiences.

Sitting beside a deathbed, staring into the face of life’s fragility, leaves us no secure corner to hide. It is always a powerful wake-up call.

The world is full of wretchedness. Nobody can deny it. Our bodies are subject to decay, disease, pain and death. And there are the miseries of the world such as poverty, inequality, hatred. Every single person whether well-known or unknown, rich or poor, young or old, carries his own bundle of misery— his body—to which he is bound by karma. A sensible person should not only recognise the immense misery in the world but should also enquire into its cause. According to a Buddhist doctrine, misery is caused by karma which is conditioned by pleasure, the product of an impure mind. This impure mind is created by the illusion of the self, avidyā or ignorance. The illusion of self can only be eradicated by prajñā or wisdom or the understanding achieved through samādhi, the concentrated mind. And the concentrated mind can only be achieved if we have observed śīla, the moral or righteous way of living. Therefore, the entire Buddhist teaching is summarised in triśikshā, the three doctrines—śīla, samādhi and prajñā. It is clear from this that meditation becomes indispensable for anybody who tries to achieve right understanding of Truth, the realisation of Truth, the realisation of selflessness or of Self as it is. Thus, we should meditate in order to develop our mind and attain an insight into the inner

Zen is Buddhism made simple again. The robes worn by Zen priests are plain black affairs (unlike the colorful getups favored by the Tibetans and their other Buddhist cousins), and even after receiving Transmission, the Zen master's daily dress is a dull brown robe. You can sit anywhere; Dogen Zenji said that the heart is the real zendo. This informs temple architecture. Plainness here is neither false humility nor a facade. It is true to the bone. Skeletal beams and rafters are seamlessly joined; they are not nailed or screwed into place; they are made to fit together. Inside a zendo, there is mostly open space, dimly lit, with a small central altar and a tan, a two-foot-high wooden platform built around the perimeter, where meditators sit on plain black cushions, facing the wall. There are few ceremonial objects—the teacher's staff, a stick of incense burning in a bowl—and it is rare to run into more than one or two bronze or wooden Buddhas. Zen rituals are spare, too. Music is reduced to an isolated ding or bong of a bell, the flat report of a mallet tapped against a slab of wood, and a thrumming bang from a giant bass drum. Even the chanting is monochromatic; students pitch their voices toward the deep, dark end of the register and grumble in unison.

It is impossible to fathom current Tibetan attitudes toward the Chinese government without grasping the enormity of what befell them in the 1950s and early 1960s. Tibetans often speak about “when the Chinese invaded”—only to be chastised by Chinese who point out that this eastern part of the plateau had been part of the Qing dynasty’s China since the early eighteenth century. But the Qing emperors were Manchus, a northern people who were nominally Tibetan Buddhists. The Han Chinese were virtually strangers. And what difference does it make? When somebody who speaks a different language comes to your town, confiscates your home, your clothing, your shoes, and your food, destroys that which is most sacred to you, imprisons the young men in your family, and shoots those who resist, it feels like an invasion whether that person is a fellow citizen or not. Tibetans aren’t talking about the fine points of international law or the definition of sovereignty: they are speaking honestly about what they experienced.

from the Tibetan Buddhist point of view, we can divide our entire existence into four continuously interlinked realities: (1) life, (2) dying and death, (3) after death, and (4) rebirth. These are known as the four bardos: (1) the natural bardo of this life, (2) the painful bardo of dying, (3) the luminous bardo of dharmata, and (4) the karmic bardo of becoming.

Tibetan Buddhists talk a lot about rebirth, both the rebirth of normal unenlightened people and that of enlightened beings such as the Dalai Lama, who is thought to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. By contrast, Zen Buddhists rarely talk in detail or in literal terms about rebirth or reincarnation.

The Parable of the Six Kinds of Beings There's a Buddhist parable that describes the generative, fictional function of awareness quite well. Here's how the 17th century Tibetan monk Ngawang Kunga Tenzin explained the parable: Ultimately there is nothing other than mind alone; nevertheless, because of delusion and karma it manifests as all kinds of things. This is similar to the different perceptions of water by the six kinds of beings. Water is indeed only one thing, but if the six kinds of beings were together at a river bank, when looking at it they would see it in different ways. A being of a hot hell would see a river of fire, while one from a cold hell would see it as snow and ice. For the hungry ghosts known as pretas it would be pus and blood. Animals who live underwater would see it as their abode, while those scattered on land would see it as drink. Humans would also see it as drink, and accordingly they would classify it into drinking or non-drinking water. The demigods called asuras would perceive it as weaponry. Gods would see it as nectar (amrita). So beings would see what we perceive as water in different ways according to their particular karmic perception and thus water becomes manifold. This is known as the karmic perception of one's mind. Ultimately things do not exist outside—they are only projections of the mind. —from The Royal Seal of Mahamudra, Volume One, A Guidebook for the Realization of Co-emergence

The purpose of life is maybe just to be. In order to be, you have to live life, which is not boring at all. In fact, there are a lot of exchanges taking place, and there is more of a sense of celebration than before. The qualities of celebration and groundlessness make for a delightful world. So you live that life. I think the conventional idea is that we lead our life because we have to struggle and we have to achieve something, which keeps us occupied. But maybe that’s just one way, and there’s an entirely different approach altogether.

Tibetan Buddhist nun Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo points out that we often mistake attachment for love. She says, “We imagine that the grasping and clinging that we have in our relationships shows that we love. Whereas actually, it is just attachment, which causes pain. Because the more we grasp, the more we are afraid to lose, then if we do lose, then of course we are going to suffer.” Ultimately, holding on to the wrong person causes us more pain than letting them go.

But if you are not careful, spirituality can quite easily allow you to bypass the human dilemma, because spirituality can be anything you want it to be, whereas faith will challenge you. It’s not so comfortable. It carries with it the undeniable tension between your search for security and the limits of your ability to know. Faith keeps your spiritual quest relevant and connected to the heart of the human predicament.

He said that a yogi must seriously examine the origin of the arising of fear, where fear abides, and where it ceases, in order to be completely free from the fear of death. When we examine the place of arising, abiding, and cessation of fear (or any afflictive emotion) and cannot find them, we should rest in the confidence that all phenomena are beyond arising, abiding, and cessation.

At the basis of my teachings, there is the opening of the heart, and I endeavor to introduce my students into the mind’s spacious states, which encompass the universes and all beings. Meditating on the opening of the heart concerns everyone, Buddhists as well as non-Buddhists, for it nurtures the fundamental human values of love, benevolence, compassion, forgiveness, human rights, and reconciliation. Without an opening of the heart, our ethics remain unembodied and can very well veer toward intolerance. Taking the path of the heart always helps us recognize the potential for kindness and transformation that is a feature of our humanity. If we have developed unconditional love, we will recognize this loving basis even in the cruelest among us, who act inhumanly because they ignore their true nature. Opening the heart makes us love beings so much that every day we renew our ever-keener longing to help them, so that they may find happiness and be delivered from suffering.

Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others;

Until then, his anger at the Chinese government was vague and unfocused. He hated the way they condescended to Tibetans. He hated the Chinese companies that were cutting trees from Tibetan land and mining in sacred hills. He hated that you could be sent to jail for reading a banned book or pamphlet, that Tibetans were forced to learn the language of their oppressors, and that they had to go to lectures in which the Chinese government defamed His Holiness the Dalai Lama. But Tsepey hadn’t felt anger toward the Chinese as individuals—he had many Chinese friends and had dated Chinese women. He was a Buddhist who respected human life.

acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them. The Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs strongly defended the monks at court and imposed a host of special rights for them. At one point the bureau tried to enforce laws that stipulated that anyone who hit a monk would have his hand

You don’t have to be a philosopher; you just have to want to know who you are.

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.

Often we hear about another’s tragedy, and it makes us feel better about our own situation. This is quite different from what the Dalai Lama was doing. He was not contrasting his situation with others, but uniting his situation with others, enlarging his identity and seeing that he and the Tibetan people were not alone in their suffering. This recognition that we are all connected—whether Tibetan Buddhists or Hui Muslims—is the birth of empathy and compassion.

When I meet someone,” the Dalai Lama said, returning to what was becoming an important theme, “I always try to relate to the person on the basic human level. On that level, I know that, just like me, he or she wishes to find happiness, to have fewer problems and less difficulty in their life. Whether I am speaking with one person, or whether I am giving a talk to a large group of people, I always see myself first and foremost as just another fellow human. That way, there is in fact no need for introduction. If, on the other hand, I relate to others from the perspective of myself as someone different—a Buddhist, a Tibetan, and so on—I will then create walls to keep me apart from others.

The way to develop the altruistic intention a. Seven points of cause and effect 1. Equanimity between fnend, enemy and stranger is the preliminary. 2. Seven points: recognizing sentient beings as your mother, remembening their kindness, wishing to repay it, heart-warming love, compassion, great determination, altruistic intention b. Equalizing and exchanging self and others: equalizing self and others, disadvantages of selfishness, advantages of cherishing others, exchanging self and others, taking others’ suffering and giving them your happiness and its causes c. Combining the above two methods into one

According to Buddhist understanding, being born human results from virtuous actions in our past lives. Take a moment to think about how rare it is in today’s world to work for the welfare of others, or to practice patience in the face of aggression, or to give money or food during tough economic times. When compared with all the actions motivated by self-interest and aggression, those that arise from altruism and sacrifice are few and far between. This relates to karma, which is the third thought that turns the mind toward dharma. We will discuss this in detail later. For the moment, just appreciate that you were born in this rare form and that this did not happen by chance. Appreciate that much, and don’t worry about anything else.

Separating Tibetans from the propaganda that smothers them, whether western or Chinese, was one of my aspirations. But pushing aside the heavy, patterned blankets decorated with Buddhist symbols that shield the entrances to Lhasa’s teahouses did not admit me into a secret world where Tibetans spoke unguardedly. Instead, I was confronted with a passiveness completely at odds with the belligerence of the nomads of Kham and the people of Amdo. Resolving the contradiction between those two extremes was something I never managed to achieve during my time in Tibet.

When they went into solitude, followed a spiritual practice, and truly faced themselves and the fact of death, they were healed. What is this telling us? That when we accept death, transform our attitude toward life, and discover the fundamental connection between life and death, a dramatic possibility for healing can occur. Tibetan Buddhists believe that illnesses like cancer can be a warning, to remind us that we have been neglecting deep aspects of our being, such as our spiritual needs.4 If we take this warning seriously and change fundamentally the direction of our lives, there is a very real hope for healing not only our body, but our whole being.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, a contemporary Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhist) scholar, states that the “great seal [mahamudra] refers to emptiness,” and quotes the statement of the Buddha in the King of Concentrations Sutra: “The nature of all phenomena is the great seal.”⁴³ Gyatso explains, “Here, ‘nature’ refers to the ulti- mate nature of all things: their emptiness, or lack of inherent existence. Such emptiness is called the great seal because phenomena never move or change from the state of lacking inherent existence.

Meditation on the “seal,” that is, the “immobilization” of all dependent things, is for the purpose of liberation from the cycle of existence. The notion of “empti- ness” (Tibetan: stong pa nid) is central to Vajrayana Buddhism (as indeed it is to many schools of Buddhist thought) and is derived from Nagarjuna’s teaching that the essential nature of all dharmas (phenomenal existents) is sunyata, void or empty. As Tibetan scholar Herbert V. Guenther translates the term, sunyata or stong pa nid means “no-thing-ness,” all existents being inherently insubstantial.⁴⁵ The sense of “seal” (mudra) in Gyatso’s commentary is clearly the sense of being sealed in to this state of inherent “no-thing-ness.

Emptiness” is a singularly unappetizing term. I don’t think it was ever meant to be attractive. The Tibetan Buddhist scholar Herbert V. Guenther once translated it as “the open dimension of being,” which sounds a lot more appealing than “emptiness.” “Transparency” was a term I played with for a while, which also makes emptiness sound more palatable. Yet we have to remember that even two thousand years ago Nāgārjuna was having to defend himself against the nihilistic implications of emptiness.

As on any scale or spectrum, both ends have their poster-boy hall-of-famers. At one end we have the Sutcliffes, and Lecters, and Bundys – the Rippers, and Slashers, and Stranglers. While at the other we have the antipsychopaths: elite spiritual athletes like Tibetan Buddhist monks, who, through years of black-belt meditation in remote Himalayan monasteries, feel nothing but compassion. In fact, the latest research from the field of cognitive neuroscience suggests that the spectrum might be circular . . . that across the neural dateline of sanity and madness, the psychopaths and anti-psychopaths sit within touching distance of each other. So near, and yet so far.

Most scandalous of all was that the Tibetan Buddhist delegation led by the Dali Lama were allowed to place an idol of Buddha on top of a Catholic tabernacle in the Chapel of San Pietro, as reported by the New York Times.130 To this idol they burned incense within a Catholic church with permission from the pope.

The great protector Maitreya said that when one realizes the state of equality, or the nature of mind, there are no lower realms or lower births. All is the expression of a pure land. We often think of the pure realms of realized beings as existing somewhere outside of us. It is important to realize that, in regards to a pure land, there is no place to go. The only pure realm is mastery of the mind.

Moving from a more focused approach to self-awareness and our own personal karma to a more relational approach to how we interact with others is referred to as the transition from the Hinayana7 (narrow vehicle) to the Mahayana (expansive vehicle) within the historically Tibetan tradition. The journey of relationships is not a better path—it’s just a natural broadening of the scope of our practice.

It is the Tibetan Buddhist view that all living beings, including animals, experience this radiant light just at the moment of true death. This experience occurs regardless of the particular faith or religious beliefs of the person involved. There is a certain amount of corroboration for this in the reports of those in the West and elsewhere who have returned from near-death experiences. However, one should be cautious in equating the two experiences since, from a Buddhist point of view, such individuals have not truly died. Perhaps they are just experiencing the phenomena described earlier that precede actual death. Death itself is said to have occurred only when blood and lymph begin to trickle from the nostrils of the corpse.

There are traditionally six modes of existence that are not conducive to spiritual growth. It is said that a predominance of any one particular type of negativity results in rebirth in the most appropriate mode. Thus, pride leads to rebirth as a god, jealousy as a demi-god, attachment as a human being, stupidity as an animal, greed as a hungry ghost and hatred as a hell denizen. If we choose, we do not have to understand these modes of existence solely in literal terms. Figuratively speaking, these modes can be seen as psychological states, given the Buddhist idea that all things are shaped and formed by the mind.

The Sanskrit word samsara—which traditionally represents the summation of all our confusion and destructive patterns of behavior—literally means “wandering around.” The Tibetan word for a sentient being caught up in confusion—drowa—could be translated as “always on the go.” I like to think of this word as meaning “commuter.

Khubilai’s capital in China, Khanbalikh (also known as Ta-tu or Dadu), was symbolic of the way Mongol rulers amalgamated the diverse cultures, beliefs, and skills of their domains. In it were built a shrine for Confucians, an altar with Mongolian soil and grass from the steppes, and buildings of significant Chinese architectural influence. As historian Morris Rossabi points out, Khubilai “sought the assistance of Persian astronomers and physicians, Tibetan Buddhist monks” and “Central Asian [Muslim] soldiers.” One can only imagine it must have been a city of grand cosmopolitan dimensions.