A Selection of Teachings from a Tibetan Buddhist Tradition

[From a Q&A session in a teaching on Secret Path to Unity taught by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.]

Q: If you’ve fallen away from practice, how do you recover the momentum? 

A: The best solution to that problem is to meditate everyday for a very short period, no more than 10 or 15 minutes, in order to create the habit of daily practice. 

Everything that we do that seems natural to us is, in fact, habitual. All of the things that we do that seem effortless, almost automatic, are effortless or automatic for us because we are habituated to them. We have become habituated to them throughout many lifetimes. For example, our kleshas: We don’t need to work to give rise to kleshas because we’re used to doing it. They are habitual. 

The same thing has to be true of practice. We have to create a habit of practice. You’ll know that you’ve created a habit practice when because of circumstances you don’t do it on a certain day you’ll feel that something’s missing, something’s wrong.

The way to do this is by practicing everyday for a short period of time, devoting yourself to the practice for those few minutes. This is much more effective. Sometimes people feeling badly because they’ve  stopped practicing try to practice for hours and hours when they get back to it. This causes them to burn out and then they won’t practice for months. That approach doesn’t work so well. 

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

I think there’s something about the context of these songs, these dialogues, that I had best make clear. As is probably obvious to many of you, most of the disciples who wrote Barway Dorje requesting instructions had done quite a bit of practice and received quite a bit of instruction before doing so. So essentially, most of their particular requests are requests for two things: correction, the identification of errors in the way they’re practicing, and enhancement, suggestions or advice about how they can progress further. Especially in the case of this last song that we just looked at [The Song of Tondar], it is evident from the way that the request is made that what the student is actually requesting is how to use his conviction that his guru is a buddha as a means to achieve ultimate awakening. And that’s what Terchen Barway Dorje explains in his answer.

So as many of you understand, whether you’re here or watching this online, these instructions are founded upon personal history with practice. And they’re also founded upon a very specific attitude toward the relationship between being, per se, and life as we know it. 

The fundamental view here is that each and every being whether we are, at the moment, a better person or worse person, whether we are a human being or an insect, that each and every one of us has an identical nature. And that this nature because it is an inherent — not only capacity for but disposition to awakening and perfection — is fit to be called that, the nature of awakening or sugatagarbha, buddha nature. It follows from this that inherently each and every being is equally capable of and on a fundamental level equally disposed towards Buddhahood. Now this is, of course, a buddhist doctrine or dogma, but it is more than a dogma because it actually describes the truth. 

However, there is a second thing that we also need to understand: that while that always is, always will be, and always has been the nature of each and every one of us — we are all deluded. And we are deluded by nothing other than our own ignorance of our own nature. But nevertheless, that delusion, as simple as it may sound, is sufficient to plunge us in life as we know it — beginningless and potentially endless spinning samsara. Therefore, all means of practice, of prayer, of supplication, of meditation taught in the buddhist tradition are all, without exception, means to dispel this delusion. 

So the context for these songs really depends upon understanding these two points: that everyone has buddha nature and everyone’s buddha nature is equally perfect. And secondly, that everyone is deluded and unless we dispel that delusion, we will never reveal our own perfect buddha nature. I mention this because if these two points are not understood as the underpinnings of these songs, then they sound practically meaningless. They sound like a lot of conversations about not very much, but they have great meaning, if you understand these two points and also if you take to heart the very practical advice concerning causality and the results of actions. 

[From a public talk given in Tampa, Florida, on January 10, 2020 by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamytso.]

Q. Do you have any advice for us in how we can deal with the turmoil and the destruction of the world that’s going on right now?

Trans. You’re talking specifically about the environmental destruction or everything?

Q. Everything.

Trans. How we deal with it? Or how we fix it?

Q. Both.

A. I’m waiting for someone to tell me. [Laughter]

We have to have some perspective on the nature of our world and on its current state. In general, you know, the world that we live in, what we experience, is samsara. We live in samsara, which means that we have kleshas. We have mental afflictions. And if I may say so, nowadays, it’s becoming fairly evident that our mental afflictions are on the increase. To respond to the understanding that the world is samsara, that our world, what we experience, is samsara, by hating the world, hating what’s happening in the world, and by forgetting that our experience of it is really through the filter of our own kleshas is an inappropriate response even in the worst of times. Because the most powerful thing that we can do for the world is for each of us – anyone who is willing to do so – is to take responsibility for our own minds and our own states of mind. We may think that as good Buddhists, we should reject the world, hate the world and say the world is samsara. Samsara is out there. This is a samsaric world. It’s impure, it’s nasty. I don’t like it. We may think that that’s what Buddhism teaches, but it doesn’t.

If we say that this world is samsara and samsara is evil and bad, we are cultivating the klesha of anger. That is not the determination to be free which the Buddha taught. It’s just another way of giving in to kleshas.

Samsara is not the particular world or a particular period in which we live. It is our not knowing how to act, our not knowing how to treat others, not knowing how to treat ourselves, not knowing how to treat the physical environment of this world. And that’s not on the world. That’s on us.

So what is the correct or appropriate or helpful response to this that nowadays our kleshas our increasing and things are looking pretty grim. Not to hate the world or demonize the world or anyone in it, but to make the aspiration: May we all learn what to do and what not to do. May we all learn how to treat ourselves, others, and the environment. And we are only protected from samsara if we adopt that attitude without partiality; without trying to blame anything or anyone in the external world.

The story is very, very commonly found all over the world. In the Buddhist tradition, it’s in the Bodhicharyavatara by Shantideva that you cannot cover the entire world with leather to prevent your feet from being pierced by thorns. But you can cover the soles of your feet with leather. And nowadays I should probably say rubber.

And this is why there’s really nothing better than bodhichitta. Just as if you have shoes on wherever you go, they are protecting your feet without your having to interfere with the external world. If you have bodhichitta, by which I mean that you truly are impartial, that your benevolence in wanting everyone to be happy and not to suffer is truly universal, that nobody is written off, nobody is excluded, then that is like wearing good shoes.