A Selection of Teachings from a Tibetan Buddhist Tradition

[From the Commentary on The Daily Guru Rinpoche Sadhana with Tsok by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.]

“In the past it was said that a practitioner should be a radical renunciant; become a child of the mountain; wear mist as clothing; and abandon all concerns for food, clothing, and conversation. Nowadays we cannot live like that, but we can practice every day for a limited amount of time. We can schedule ten minutes, fifteen minutes, or possibly an hour of daily practice into our busy lives. However, what is more important than the amount of time we practice is the purity of intention and motivation we have. It is more important that we practice with a mind that is free of kleshas and impure motivation than it is to practice for a long time. Every moment of purely motivated practice is like a drop of pure water. The largest ocean is filled through the aggregation of drops of water. In the same way if we devote our bodies, speech, and minds to pure practice for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, or an hour every day, then we will fill the ocean of awakening. We cannot practice motivated by competitiveness, jealousy, or territoriality. Training our minds in benevolence and compassion must be the essence of our practice.”

[From a teaching on Songs of Barway Dorje, Part 14, by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.]

Buddhism has never accepted the notion of a permanent source of refuge that is other than the being seeking refuge him or herself.

Buddhism is based on the teachings of the historical Buddha — Shakyamuni or Siddhartha Gautama. He was a human being. Born as a crown prince of a very small and relatively short-lived kingdom in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. He meditated with great effort, great intensity, and he came to recognize something. He came to recognize that what a mind really is, any mind, buddhanature, is itself the cause of awakening. That was his recognition of how things are.

He also recognized that each and every being has this buddhanature. That is his recognition of the extent of things. (We talk about the two wisdoms: knowledge of dharmata and knowledge of its ubiquitousness or extent.) Because he saw that, he also saw how ignorance of this buddhanature causes suffering.

We could say that what the Buddha discovered was that mind is buddhanature. If you have a mind, you have buddhanature because mind is buddhanature. There is no such thing as a mind without buddhanature. If you have a mind, you have buddhanature because mind cannot be anything else. Therefore, if you work hard you can achieve, as the Buddha demonstrated, buddhahood in one life and one body.

[From a teaching on Songs of Barway Dorje, Part 8, by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.]

When the sun rises into the sky in the morning, it does not need to get rid of the darkness. The darkness is not some kind of solid thing or commodity that needs to be drained out of the sky or swept away from the earth or buried under the ground. The darkness, in that sense, isn’t a thing. It’s an absence. And when the light of the sun fills the sky, fills the world, that itself is the ending for that day of the darkness. 

So we think that our state of darkness is a thing, a possession, some thing that we have and it’s all we’ve ever known. So we fear the illumination of awakening as some kind of loss. But just as the rising and the shining of the sun in the sky is not a loss of darkness, it’s not as though the world has lost its capacity for shadow, in the same way we have nothing to lose. 

What happens is when you pray to the Three Jewels and Three Roots, when you pray to your guru, then your mind becomes brighter, clearer, more luminous. And as you get brighter, the darkness naturally diminishes, but it’s not diminishing in the sense of a thing being drained out of you. It’s not a thing. It’s just like the darkness at night.