Into the Heart of Life (25 page)
Read Into the Heart of Life Online
Authors: Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Tags: #General, #Religion, #Buddhism, #Rituals & Practice, #Tibetan
At the moment, we have five young nuns in three-year retreat, and they are being taught by the senior yogi, Togden Achoe. At the moment all the meditation teachers are male, but sometimes the nuns need a different approach. Things come up which they can’t discuss with their male teachers. Feminine energies are different, and the nuns are embarrassed to explain to a man what they are experiencing, which would not be the case if they were explaining themselves to another woman. And women need to have examples. But unless these girls and young women are properly trained, they will never be able to reach that level of stable realization, which requires great guidance and training and many years of dedication.
So this is what we are trying to do. Bringing forth a small group of very dedicated and realized young women is our gift to the lineage and to the world.
Q: For those who are unfamiliar with the divine feminine, how would you describe the power of Tara? And what is your personal experience with Tara?
JTP: It’s very interesting that the idea of the divine feminine has always been present everywhere in the world, and despite the insistence through the last millennium or so on a male-only divinity, somehow the feminine has always managed to speak up. Whether we think in terms of Tara or Guanyin or Isis or the Virgin Mary, there is this sense of
mother
. With our father, we may feel that we have to be good and work hard to get his approval; we try to reach up to him. But with our mother, even if we’re the naughtiest, ugliest little baby in the world, we are loved; she reaches down to us just as we reach for her. We don’t have to keep trying, because for our mother we are the most precious being. She doesn’t care who or what we are. She simply loves us. And this quality is very much embodied in Tara. There are many stories of Tara. Sometimes they tell of rascals and of how she has helped them. You don’t have to be super-good in order to be helped because she is the mother—she’s there to clear away obstacles and to open up opportunities for us to lead our lives properly. Tara is always immediate.
There are many accounts by people who have never met with Tibetan Buddhism who nonetheless have had visions of a green lady wearing beautiful jewels. Sometimes, these practitioners were Catholics who thought they were seeing the Virgin Mary, though afterwards, they thought, “Now wait a minute, she was
green
.” One lama, a great devotee of Tara, was teaching when one student said, “I’m willing to do all of these Tara practices”—of course it was a Western student—“and I’ll do whatever you say, but I have one question for you. Is Tara real? Is she true? Does she exist?” And the lama thought about it and said, “She knows she is not real.”
And that’s it. That is the difference between Tara and us—we think we are real.
8
Faith and Devotion
B
very skeptical, I’m not sure if I’m the right person to speak of faith and devotion. But let’s do our best to inquire.
The Lord Buddha himself actually put faith at the forefront of the five powers needed in order to attain buddhahood. He described faith as a leaping forward. And in this light he used the analogy of a river without any bridge across it. People who were on one side of this river wanted to proceed to the other side, but they held back. “No, the river is too wide,” they said. “It’s too deep; it’s flowing too fast—we can’t make it.” They hesitated. But one man who had more courage said, “We can do it. I believe that it’s possible to cross.” He then crossed the river with that sense of determination and faith. And because he got across, others were encouraged to cross, too. In other words, faith is an expression of confidence. Faith is not a kind of blindness, or a belief in something just because one is credulous.
In Buddhism, faith is an inner confidence in something that is worthy of our trust. For example, we have faith in the Dharma, but that doesn’t mean we have to blindly swallow everything we read. Just because it is written in the holy books or because a lama says it, doesn’t mean we have to believe it. In the Buddhadharma, that kind of credulous, unquestioning, naive belief is not necessarily considered to be a virtue at all. The quality of questioning in an intelligent manner, really investigating and seeing for ourselves whether something is worthy of our belief or not, is very much encouraged.
And it’s not only the Dharma that we are encouraged to question but also the whole attitude about teachers. Sometimes I would go to my lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche, and show him a passage I just could not swallow. He would laugh and say, “Oh, come on! You don’t have to believe everything that’s written in the books or said in the sutras—it may not be true.” At one time he said that a lot of what was written in the books and in the sutras was a result of the particular cultural accretions and superstitions of that time. It’s not eternal truth. It’s just what they happened to believe at that time, and the Buddha couldn’t be bothered to negate it because it wasn’t very important. For example, some Westerners grapple desperately with the whole description of Mount Sumeru and the four continents in order to keep complete and unquestioning faith in their lama’s teachings.
Once I gave a talk to our youngest monks about the sun and the earth and the moon. I held an apple in one hand and an orange in the other in order to explain that the moon goes around the earth and both go around the sun, and so forth. There was an old monk at the back of the room who said, “Where is Mount Sumeru and the four continents? The earth is flat on the back of a turtle.” I said, “Well, as far as we can tell, there is no Mount Sumeru and the four continents. The earth is not flat, it’s round.” The old monk just nodded and said something like, “Oh well.” Maybe in medieval Europe I would have been burnt at the stake for less. But in the world of delusory appearances, flat or round—who cares? We don’t have to swallow everything we’re told. Being credulous is actually not a virtue. We have to bring our intelligence to everything.
In the Buddhadharma, there are three aspects. First, we hear or study the Dharma. We hear about it, we read about it, and then we think about it. We really think about what we’ve read or heard; we turn it over in our mind. And if there are any doubts, we ask about them. When our doubts are settled, we go away to contemplate the matter until we become that teaching. We don’t just bite off the Dharma and gobble it down in a big lump which then sits like a heavy ball in our stomach. We really have to chew it well until we can swallow it and become nourished by it.
One of the beautiful things about the Buddhadharma is its essential truth. As soon as we hear it, we think, “Oh yes, right!” We recognize the truth of issues like impermanence, the unsatisfactory nature of general existence, the fact that our clinging to an ego gives rise to our problems in the first place. The fact is that these negative qualities of mind like our delusion, our greed and clinging, our aggression and anger, our pride and jealousy and envy afflict the mind and create great pain. This isn’t a belief. This isn’t a matter of faith. This is a matter of just looking at the situation and thinking, “Yes, that’s right!” Whenever our mind is unhappy, if we really look into it, the problem is always these very poisonous emotions in our mind. Our depression is mostly caused by the aggression in the mind. Even if that aggression is turned toward ourselves as it very often is, it’s usually based on this root of hatred.
When one looks into the fundamentals of the Buddhadharma, there’s something inside us which quickly realizes, “Yes, that’s how it is.” A sense of confidence may unfold because we think, “If these very basic teachings are so clear and so true, then maybe there are more advanced teachings which my deluded mind cannot yet completely comprehend at the moment.” And then if we don’t understand something, instead of saying, “No, this is all wrong because I don’t understand it and it doesn’t agree with my preconceptions,” we can say, “Right now I don’t understand this. This doesn’t accord with how I see things. For now, I’ll put it to one side and later, when I have studied and practiced and experienced more, I’ll go back and look at it again.”
So we’re not heretics if we don’t have blind faith and a belief in dogmas. It’s not like that. Every step of the way, we have to know where we are putting our foot down. We have to understand what it means. We have to question. We have to really investigate and use our intelligence.
In the traditional form of studying philosophy in Tibet, every part of a given text is debated. You must have seen those pictures of people standing up and engaging in these very ritualized debates. They take each section and dissect it while questioning the opponent, trying to trip them up. They each have to defend their position with quotations from the sutras and from the masters of the Buddhist tradition, and not only that. They must engage one another through logic and clear exposition of a given point. In other words, we really have to understand what we believe and what we don’t believe, and why we believe it or not. This is very important. We should really inquire into the truth of everything we read. And we should really inquire into the truth of our lives as well.
We can look for and see examples of this. If we don’t believe in something, then why don’t we believe it? We can go and discuss it with someone who is more learned and more realized than ourselves, and see if they can explain it to us clearly. If they can’t resolve the matter for us, then we put it aside for now. And then, from time to time, we bring it back out for our deeper scrutiny, and maybe we say, “Well, it makes more sense now. Why wasn’t it clear before?” In that light, in Buddhism, faith is not a blind faith. That’s not encouraged. What is encouraged is the kind of confidence that stems from knowing that enlightened masters really are enlightened, really do understand the nature of reality, and can make the whole thing very clear for us. And what we have to do is trust that when we study, analyze, and look, it will all become very clear.
As we practice and integrate the Dharma into our everyday life, again and again, we find ourselves suddenly saying, “Yes, right, that’s what he meant when he said that.” The whole thing suddenly comes alive and becomes real. It comes from the head down into the heart and is confirmed. “Right. That’s what she meant. Yes.”
Devotion is much more tricky. As I go around the world, both in the West and in the East, one of the main questions asked is, “How do I find the perfect master?” I have a friend in Italy who’s convinced that somewhere there is the perfect master waiting for him and at a certain point, he’s somehow going to meet him. And this master is going to say the word or just gaze into his eyes and say, “You are the one,” or something like that, and then this man is going to be enlightened! And if he can’t immediately give him enlightenment, obviously he’s not a perfect master. Therefore, my Italian friend does nothing. He doesn’t practice. He feels that to practice and try to make any effort on one’s own side is counterproductive! We just wait until the karma is right and the master appears, and that’s it. Even though that’s an extreme case, you’d be surprised how many people secretly believe this.
Many people have this fantasy of somehow coming across some yogi or lama sitting on a mountain-top who looks up and says, “Ah, I’ve been waiting for you. What took you so long?” People think that if they could only find the perfect master who’s just right for them, all their problems would be solved. Sometimes I say to people, “Look, even if you meet your master, that’s when your problems begin!” In fact, even if the Buddha himself was sitting in front of us right now, what could he do to our untamed and uncontrolled minds?
Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes the lama a lot. There is particular emphasis on what is called the
tsawai lama
or root guru. It should be understood, first of all, that the teachers or lamas from whom we receive ordinations, initiations, teachings, or have any contact with, are not by any means necessarily our root guru.
There are many levels of teachers. There are teachers who bestow the precepts on us. Those are our preceptors. There are lamas who grant us initiations, and those are our initiatory masters. There are lamas who teach us philosophy and the intellectual side of the Dharma, and those are our professors. There are many kinds of lamas. There are lamas we go to for advice and help, and those are our spiritual friends, our
kalyanamitra
. It’s actually quite rare to meet with the lama who is our root or heart guru. Traditionally, at least in the Kagyu and Nyingma schools, the root guru is the lama who points out to us the true nature of the mind. The one who points out to us the essential naked awareness behind the conceptual coming and going of the thoughts and who reveals to us our innate buddha nature. That is the root guru.
I was very fortunate in meeting my own lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche, on my twenty-first birthday. Although he passed away in 1980 at the age of forty-eight, he was very quickly reborn and is now in his twenties. He is the spiritual head of the nunnery which we have founded. In all these years he has always been my lama, and he is always still sitting in my heart. In this way, it could be said that I have devotion. And in this I am constant, but that is because Rinpoche for me is what is called a
tserab gyi lama,
which means the lama through all our lifetimes. In each lifetime, when we meet with our teacher again, there is instant recognition from both sides. That is very fortunate because then there’s no need to doubt; there’s an immediate acceptance. The important thing is that we have to really trust the lama. We have to trust that he understands us better than we understand ourselves. Otherwise, how can he guide us if he doesn’t know and see us more clearly than we see ourselves?
It’s also possible that we’ll meet with teachers with whom we may not have that sense of instant acceptance and recognition, but we like them. We feel a sense of, “This is a good person.” Sometimes people meet with lamas and think, “I don’t know what he believes, but whatever it is, I’ll go for it.” There is this sense of instant trust.
But we don’t know, and this is where it gets tricky. In our culture, we are very much drawn by charisma. It is a culture of worshiping film stars and rock stars and sportsmen. Even our presidents sometimes end up being the ones who have the most glamour, and we can get very caught up in taking this charisma for genuine inner qualities. Sometimes, the most charismatic teachers are not the ones who have the most genuine inner realization. Some of the most genuinely realized beings are outwardly uncharismatic, totally unassuming, and seemingly ordinary.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama says that according to the tantric texts, we should examine the lama for at least three years and at most twelve years. We should examine him, or as His Holiness puts it, we should “spy” on the lama. Because it’s not just how they appear when they are on the throne giving teachings and initiations, but also what they’re like behind the scenes. How do they treat their attendants; how do they treat people who are of no particular importance to them? Not how do they treat their big sponsors, but how do they treat ordinary people? Look; watch. Don’t be beguiled by the glamour; don’t be over-impressed by their reputation; don’t be seduced by the fact that they have thousands of students and big organizations. Look; ask around. Ask not just their disciples, but also other people. Investigate, because after taking a lama as our heart guru, we are putting our life on the line to that person. And as they say, if it is not a true guru, then hand-in-hand, teacher and disciple will jump into the chasm.