–Padmasambhava, a.k.a. Padmakara

Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche

Note: a great online source for inspirational passages is the aptly named “Just Dharma Quotes,” which includes a rich collection of words from Padmasambhava here. You can also follow the site via Twitter at @JDharmaQuotes.

–Padmasambhava, a.k.a. Padmakara

Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche

When one knows God, they are free:
their sorrows have an end, and birth and death are no more.
When in inner union they are beyond the world of the body,
then the third world, the world of the Spirit, is found, where the power of the All is,
and they have all: for they are one with the ONE.
–The Svetasvatara Upanishad

Don’t cry because it’s over,
Smile because it happened.
–Dr. Seuss

When the doctor gives me up,
When rituals no longer work,
When friends have given up hope for my life,
When anything I do is futile,
May I be blessed to remember my guru’s instructions.
–Attributed to a Panchen Lama

May my Aunt Beth have a swift passage through the bardos, and may her next incarnation provide her with the opportunity to love and nurture others as she did in this lifetime.  Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum.

༄ཨོཾ་ཨཱཿ་ཧཱུྃ་བཛྲ་གུ་རུ་པངྨ་མ་སིདྡྷི་ཧཱུྃ།

In horror of death I took to the mountains,
and meditated on the uncertainty and the hour of death.
Now capturing the fortress of deathless, unending nature of mind,
all fear of death is done and over with.
-Milarepa

Some of the most profound words attributed to Milarepa, Tibet’s great yogi-saint whose story of redemption continues to inspire Buddhists in the modern world.  He is said to have been the first to achieve a state of complete enlightenment in one lifetime, learning and practicing at the feet of Marpa Lotsawa, or Marpa the Translator.

The beauty of these words lies in the fact that an individual, under the guidance of a spiritual teacher or mentor (Tibetan: lama; Sanskrit: guru) and with an unwavering commitment to his or her practice, can “capture the fortress” of the deathless and unending nature of mind. Here’s how my own teacher describes the “nature of mind” (Tibetan: sem-nyi, where sem is ordinary mind — the opposite of our inherent pure awareness, or rigpa — and nyi is the limitless sense of possibility where anything can arise or happen):

“Imagine a sky, empty, spacious, and pure from the beginning; [the nature of mind's] essence is like this. Imagine a sun, luminous, clear, unobstructed, and spontaneously present; its nature is like this. Imagine that sun shining out impartially on us and all things, penetrating all directions; its energy, which is the manifestation of compassion, is like this: Nothing can obstruct it and it pervades everywhere.”  – Sogyal Rinpoche

How amazing that we all are born with semnyi, with unalterable beauty and purity that defies description.  For the sake of all sentient beings, may we all purify the adventitious stains that obscure our view so that we may experience our ultimate nature!

–from the Gaṇḍavyūha Sutra

Without being too specific to the issue, here’s what she had to say:

• Stay centered and stay grounded.
• Keep it short, pithy and from the heart.
• Essentialize what you’ve learned.
• Highlight what made a certain experience ‘real’ to you.
• Breathe.

Advice for this specific situation…but also, I think, advice for life.

So I say to her:

__/|\__

Thank you!

At breakfast this morning, I was in a rush with less than 15 minutes to put food on a plate, sit for a moment to eat and then get to my assigned volunteer post in another building. In the process, I grabbed a breakfast sandwich in the cafeteria — an English muffin with a fried egg they had given a catchy name in homage to the Egg McMuffin. I threw a couple of slices of bacon on the sandwich, and then set my plate down for a moment to grab silverware.

When I came back to the counter, two guys were literally laughing and pointing at my sandwich. I didn’t understand their French, but it was obvious they were directing it at my breakfast.

As I walked away, I felt sadness, anger and shame. Why are they picking on me, I thought. Taking my seat, I watched them walk to the other side of the cafeteria. My ego was a bit bruised.

Throughout the day, I kept encountering one of the guys. My inner monologue silently passed judgment while he went about his business. A few hours later, I had a realization: there was no reason for my feelings to be hurt. He wasn’t laughing at me…he was laughing at a sandwich that, to a French-Canadian, was probably quite funny. A McSandwich with bacon. And it was the round type of bacon, no less, which I’m sure is made especially for American biscuits.

The next thing I knew, I was chuckling under my breath. It was funny, actually.

The whole encounter has me thinking: ego probably needs to get hurt — or, at the very least, must be made to feel uncomfortable — before someone is able to address their own self-grasping. Otherwise, what’s the point? If my ego feels safe and secure, and I’m not doing anything to chip away at its power, then, in the words of Charlie Sheen, ego is WINNING!!! I certainly don’t need tiger blood to figure that out.

This has to be why spiritual transformation (at least in the Buddhist sense) is so difficult. My ego has had 40 years to get nice and comfy. It’s grip is strong and powerful. It’s dug in, and it would have me think that there’s no other way.

My meditation practice has (perhaps) helped soften it, but that same practice has also opened my eyes to the fact that ego, in the form of self-grasping and self-cherishing, is a constant source of the obscurations that hide my true potential as a human being. I know that ego blocks my ability to unpack the emotional baggage that sometimes keeps me “stuck” to painful memories from my past. With ego so firmly in control, how can I ever truly embrace the Bodhisattva’s vow?

While it certainly didn’t take a Buddhist retreat to open my eyes to the true strength of ego, I’m hopeful that this particular retreat will provide me with a powerful antidote in the form of lojong, a mind-training practice designed to cultivate compassion while loosening the grip of self-grasping. In just one day of teachings, I’ve already had to confront some unpleasant realities about the way my mind operates; I shudder to think what the next four days have in store for me.

And yet, I’m filled with gratitude that the causes and conditions are ripe for me to be on the receiving end of these powerful and profound teachings.

Here he is, mashed up and auto-tuned, reminding us of the power of individualism, creativity and learning.  Enjoy.

The fruit of silence is prayer.
The fruit of prayer is faith.
The fruit of faith is love.
The fruit of love is service.
The fruit of service is peace.

These words are set to music in Elizabeth Atkinson’s well-known SSAA composition, which includes the Latin rite’s invocation of Dona nobis pacem, performed here by participants in a summer fine arts camp choir.  Enjoy.

In the Summer 2012 edition of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, Sōtō Zen teacher Tenshin Reb Anderson writes about the three turnings of the dharma wheel. To introduce the article, he pens:

A buddha is someone who sees the way things really are. When we see the way things really are, we see that we’re all in this together, that we are all interdependent. A great surpassing love arises from that wisdom, and that love leads a buddha to wish that all beings would open to this wisdom and be free of the misery that arises from ignoring the way things are. Buddhas appear in the world because they want us to have a buddha’s wisdom, so that we will love every single being completely and protect every single being without exception and without limit — just as all the buddhas do.

I simply can’t imagine a better answer to the question.