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Welcome everybody. We are looking forward to have a nice weekend with all of you here in Nijmegen, the personal friends, the members of Jewel Heart, and also those who are not a direct member of Jewel Heart but like to be here. Welcome all of you.

When you do a workshop like this I would like each and everyone of you to have some kind of close relation rather than you watching from over there and saying: ‘Well, I want to find out what this is all about’ and me sitting and talking over here.

The second question: Do you have any expectations? What are you expecting to gain out of this weekend? I don’t think anybody will expect to become enlightened over the weekend and I am also sure nobody is expecting to become a bodhisattva, which is the buddhist terminology for a dedicated altruistic person. It is recommended not to have any expectations at all and if that is the case with you it is great. Let us not build up many expectations, however let us hope to gain something. That something should be a slight difference in personality or way of thinking before the weekend and after. Let’s hope to get a slight difference in the personality, in the way we are approaching the world, our friends, companion, children or whatever.

One more thing. I have been working with the members of the Jewel Heart here on a complete teaching of a shorter Lamrim of Tsong Khapa and we were left with a little part at the end [which we didn’t finish]. We can combine it together here with this. Thus you are going to get a true tradition, yet with a lot of room for adjustments. There is no need for earlier buddhist background. Most of you have a buddhist background. That is great. It makes it much easier for me to talk. However if you have difficulty to understand, raise your hand and stop me at any time.

What is love? What is compassion?

When we talk about love, what are we talking about? We are not talking about attachment. We are not talking about excitement. We are talking about wishing to make [someone] joyful, happy and pleasant. In a way that is even true in ordinary love, the juicy love. You know, when you say: ‘I love you’ what does it mean? The expression one person is giving to another is not necessarily telling the other person: ‘I am going to posses you, I am going to take you over.’ They are telling: ‘I wish and I want to make you happy and joyful’. Do you get that message? It is so, mostly, even with our ordinary word love. I am sure everyone of us here has exchanged that word a number of times. Right?

So the point of love is: wishing the other to be well and wishing the other to have a joyful state, whatever it may be. Keep that as one straight point. Let there be no misunderstanding. Okay?

Now the second portion is the compassion. What does compassion mean? It is quite simple. Love and compassion is like a piece of cloth folded either this way or that way. Love is wishing them joy and happiness. Compassion is the mind which makes remove their sufferings, remove the pains from each individual. If you have any problems with that I will be more than happy to review and discuss it. No problems? Good. So very basically that is the idea of love and compassion. Now we are going to work towards that.

There was a great Indian saint and scholar who brought the teachings of the love-compassion oriented mental attitude into Tibet in the 12th century. The guy’s name was Atisha. Atisha, of course followed by a number of tibetan teachers and particularly Tsong Khapa, gave the Tibetans this advice:

Unless and until you become capable of loving yourself,

you can never be capable of loving others.

That is a very important statement. So important and so valuable for us. Before one develops love-compassion towards anybody else, one should be capable of loving oneself. So no matter whatever you have to do, no matter whatever it takes, it is worth to make to love yourself.

As a human being we have a beautiful and kind nature within us. So there is no reason why we cannot develop love and compassion to ourselves. At least love. Definitely we have the capability of loving ourselves. Definitely! There is no question.

However, we have different obstacles. Obstacles cover up and so don’t let us love ourselves. These obstacles sometimes go too extreme and make you even hate yourself. And then you say: ‘I couldn’t do it, I blew it, I am bad’. That makes you to look down on yourself, makes yourself so low. Sometimes we make ourselves feel embarrassed about ourselves for no reason, even to the extent of thinking: ‘I am the worst person that ever existed’. All these are obstacles that come up. Here we have to peel them off now. It is time for us to remove those feelings. It is time for us to make shine the inside beauty.

We can discuss those feelings and problems among ourselves the next few days. And you can look in and you can talk. And don’t feel bad expressing it. Also this is important: when you do such a type of workshop and somebody talks about individual problems, do leave the problem in the room and do not take it outside, do not talk it outside. That is very important. And also people who have problems should not hesitate to talk. Probably everybody thinks: ‘I don’t want to talk my problem’. I try to get across to you that if anything I talk is hitting your own problem, think that I am talking to you particularly. I really don’t know much about here, but I have seen a number of people in America or at other places that feel: ‘I am really bad, I had a lot of opportunities, but I blew them, I didn’t do it...’ You know, the guilt feeling is very heavy in the West.

I don’t have problems with guilt, but I do have problems if the guilt feeling is taken as permanent. Buddha had a problem with that too. Buddha said in the Heart sutra: ‘True, because not false.’ The point here is: whatever it is, the guilt, the guilt feelings or the perceiving person, it is impermanent. Everybody is impermanent. The person who is experiencing the guilt and the guilt itself, all of them are impermanent. It changes. And if you don’t believe that the individual changes, look in the mirror and you will know. We change our look, we change our thoughts, we change our way of approaching, we change everything. We change our mind too, don’t we? So why carry the guilt so heavy on us? Buddha, who shares his personal experience with everybody, tells:

Every non-virtuous action is purifiable.

The judeo-christian background, of which I actually don’t know anything, gives room for forgiveness. Otherwise why to go and whisper in the confessional box in the church, like I saw in the movie. That is giving room and is indicating it can be changed. Yet we carry the guilt in between somehow. For whatever the reason might be, whether for political reason or because of human manipulation or whatever, somehow we carry something heavy which is not necessary at all. And we carry this burden so much till we go crazy. So I do hope you take that heavy thing off from now on and throw it away. Remember it is impermanent.

Unless and until you will be able to peel off all these layers of obstacles, you will have difficulties to shine out the true love from your nature. Whenever they manifest, those obstacles, you have to peel them off, each one of them. And particularly you have to know that you are good. You have to recognize that you have a beautiful human nature within you. It is not only a good human nature, it is the point at which you can become fully enlightened. That is the true point. When we become fully enlightened beings, that beauty nature of the human being within each one of us, that becomes enlightened. Nothing is coming in from outside to hit you, no. It is within the individual. The individual becomes capable of shining and functioning good. Enlightenment really comes in that way. It is within us. Each and everyone of us has it. You don’t have to look to the person left and right, you have it within you.

And it is a problem, because you refuse to acknowledge it. Not only you refuse to acknowledge it, you deny it. Not only you deny it, you look at yourself and feel and tell yourself: ‘I am a bad person’. How can we do that to ourselves? Isn’t this too hard on us? It is. We, some of us, have been too hard on ourselves, too much underestimating ourselves. Now it is time to look into the other direction and acknowledge the beauty nature and good qualities within ourselves, acknowledge our compassion and begin to care for ourselves. In order to be able to love yourself you have to care for yourself. This is the point where we really have to work and improve the individual.

Once we will be able to develop love to ourselves, we begin to develop love to the others. We begin with the person we care the most, the person near and dear. Then we will be able to extend it. And then finally we can what Buddha says: love all sentient beings. That is possible if we first know how to love the person near and dear, which in turn is only possible if we can love ourselves. So, again, the first target is ourselves.

So it is not a bad idea for us to look a little bit inside. When you go home tonight, think about it, look into yourself a little bit, if necessary even look in the mirror. You are going to find you are not that bad. Definitely. Not only you are not that bad, you’ll find a lot of good things. That is where we begin tonight.

Again, if you want benefit, you have to look in. Look in and do not underestimate the individual, don’t think the individual is bad. If you have that feeling, then look for the reason why you feel bad. We do have bad points. We are not seeing those at all. The problems we have, the problems we should acknowledge, the problems we really need to get rid of by hard work, we have not acknowledged at all. Such problems are covered by the man-made self-insulting, low-esteem feelings, self-hatred. All these have covered up our basic problem.

Our basic problems we carry always, throughout. The time and opportunity to work with those problems, the greatest opportunity, is today. Somehow we have been unable to work with them, because the man-made covering-up problems are so great and we are sort of buried under them. Is that true or not? What do you think? You can speak, you don’t have to listen all the time. In a workshop like this we should really exchange ideas. If you keep on keeping your mouth shut and I keep on talking all the time, we never know where it is going.

Audience: You made a distinction between basic problems and man-made problems. Could you elaborate a little bit on these basic problems?

Rinpoche: When I am referring to man-made problems, it is the problems that we face almost everyday, such as emotional problems and so forth. And for the basic problems we are going one step beyond that, looking at our delusions that cause the emotional problems. The cause of our emotional problems is nothing but our delusions. And another step beyond that is the cause of our delusions, ignorance. When I say ignorance, probably people get in their head: ‘O yah, he is telling us we are stupid’. Definitely not. It is not ignorance of not knowing, but ignorance of wrong knowing.

Audience: Don’t you think that the ignorance you talked and the daily problems, like e.g. guilt-feelings, are interconnected? You have experienced yourself that guilt feelings is a big problem in the West, so even to clear that is difficult, that is already a big obstacle to come to deeper stages of awareness.

Rinpoche: That is absolutely right. Not only guilt, but also fear. We enjoy the hotchpotch dinner of fear, guilt and hatred all the time, which really puts us at a distance from dealing with ignorance. It almost looks like protection rims of ignorance. We put up layer after layer not to get close to it. The vajrayana techniques are supposed to cut right through, to poke through all the layers and cut the root of ignorance. But for us it is always better, at least at the beginning level, to try to peel them off one by one, these different masks.

I was taking to a friend here. The guy talked to me and one of the important points that he raised was that the most difficult thing he had faced the last couple of years was self-hatred. And [he told]: ‘When I was able to remove that mask, was able to throw it away, I saw another mask coming up’. Whether he was realizing what he was talking or not, it is a tremendous important point. Some tibetan teaching traditions tell you about the face-to-face encounter with the self.

Seeing the true self is a big problem. All these layers of different [obstacles] come up all the time. So if you are able to unmask, no matter how many times it takes, it is a great help. When you begin to unmask, it is a good sign, because you begin to look in a little bit. Most of the time we don’t look inside, we look outside. Almost all the time we look outside, because looking inside is slightly painful. Particularly if you push the right button inside, it is very painful. So to avoid that we have automatically built in self-defense systems. That self-defense mechanism works with blaming others. Right? We always do that, we always blame the other. If you really look, you find that for a lot of things we always blame other people.

On the other hand, when you say ‘I blame myself’ it is not necessarily the deeper self inside, it is the in-between one. This might be a problem, let me make it clear. We cannot make a distinction between the things we have done through the influence of delusions and the things we have done by our true nature. We are unable to make that distinction. The things we do under influence of the delusions, we always sort of automatically do. They are much more powerful than the true nature things, because, truly speaking, the true beauty nature of the human being is completely overpowered by the delusions. Almost completely overpowered, really. The other day I mentioned to you: it is our habit, it has become habitual. Actually it is true, the delusions influence, then we do things, then the delusions makes a big engraving in the individual and then so we start habitually doing it, effortlessly doing it. Look into that very carefully, acknowledge it and try to change the habits that are doing bad things.

What came in my head just now may be a little embarrassing. I am not boosting myself, but I was thinking: even if Buddha appeared personally today, I wonder whether Buddha would have more to tell than this: change your habitual patterns. I doubt it. Did you get me? I am not telling you Buddha has no extra-ordinary powers, do not misunderstand. But as words, I am not sure whether Buddha would have more than that to tell. Because our experiences of good and bad, suffering and joy all depend on karma. Karma is totally individual creation, nothing else. There are collective karmas etc., but basically even in collective karma the individual is involved.

Think carefully; we blame Bush and Saddam Houssein for the war, however each one of us has contributed and is involved via tax-paying, so we have created collective karma. All of us paid tax to kill some Iraqi. Of course we are involved thanks to Bush, but we are all involved. Even in collective karma we are involved personally a little bit. Even unwillingly. Right? None of us here is willing to put a cent for killing any Iraqi, but somehow this government-business is such a thing, sort of automatically, with or without knowledge, with or without choice, it is running. Collective and individual karma, both we created, nobody else. Unfortunately we created it.

Good karma gives good result and bad karma gives bad result, there is no quarrel about that at all. So it comes back to the individual, again. When we, each and every individual, start looking very carefully how we created karma, we find that most of the time we habitually created a lot of bad karma. When you create habitually you don’t have to put any effort, you keep on doing it all the time. So that is the place where we have to watch it very carefully, that is the place where we have to change. How wonderful it would be if we effortlessly would create good karma all the time, just like we are doing bad karma now, if we could reverse that. These bodhisattvas... What are bodhisattvas?

Audience: A being who is in a state of awakedness, who is not influenced any more by the law of karma, is in a state of buddhahood and is full of compassion.

Rinpoche: Wow, what a big bodhisattva, who is in buddhahood.

Audience: I think mother Theresa is a bodhisattva.

Rinpoche: I am not going to quarrel with that at all. As a matter of fact I am going to support you. It looks to me it is an outstanding example of a bodhisattva. And I am quite sure the christian church will also declare her a saint, after she has gone. [laughs]. Do you agree with the explanation of bodhisattva. Anyone who disagrees?

Audience: Is a bodhisattva is completely free of bad karma?

Rinpoche? Are you asking me?

Questioner: Yes.

Rinpoche: I am asking you: is that true? What do you think? I like to throw it into the audience.

Audience: I think a bodhisattva is someone who does not have feelings of I, me or mine any more.

Rinpoche: Wow, that is another big thing. How is that possible?

Audience: A bodhisattva is a person who is fully developed and whose ideal and work it is to help people to achieve that too.

Rinpoche: Why did you say fully developed?

Questioner: I was hesitating at the ‘fully’…..

Rinpoche: Good. I am glad you have hesitation.

Questioner: ……. because only a buddha is fully developed.

Rinpoche: Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. So a bodhisattva is not fully developed, not fully enlightened. That is why it is called bodhisattva, not buddha.

Now we are left with one thing: the question whether they are free of karma. To me even the buddhas are not free of karma. I did not say bad karma, okay? Karma, I said. Buddhas have build up a tremendous amount of positive karma and they are living on endless good karma. Therefore I do have a problem if you say a buddha is free of karma. So obviously bodhisattvas are not free of karma They are not free of either bad or good karma both. A great teacher has said:

Karma is so powerful, even the bodhisattvas can be reborn as animals.

When karma binds everybody, even buddhas are bound by karma, bodhisattvas certainly are. In the West you say: ‘Everybody is equal under the law’. I think that applies for karma. If a buddha produces bad karma, will that buddha suffer? Sure. We use the word if. A buddha will not produce that, therefore he is not suffering. But if he or she does, the he or she buddha will suffer. Therefore bodhisattvas are not free of karma.

Audience: If the law of karma is so strong, what do you think about the christian idea of forgiveness: that evil deeds done to you can be forgiven if you forgive others their evil deeds.

Rinpoche: I am not familiar with that, I don’t know that at all. I will share my feelings on that. If you forgive somebody you create virtue. That virtue will automatically give good results.

Audience: But these evil deeds done to others, have to be purified.

Rinpoche: Sure, it has to be purified. If the individual person does not purify it, I don’t think it can be purified. If the person is not willing to purify, I don’t think that karma goes away, according to the buddhist karmic principle. But on the other hand, when the person is coming and seeking forgiveness, it is almost equal to purification, because there is no reason to seek forgiveness unless you regret, and you do have the act of doing something positive. So there is the object and base, there is some compassion somewhere, so it is almost equal to purification. We may be labeling it differently – we say that purify and you say seek forgiveness – but there is a very close connection. Whether it is 100% the same I am not sure, but there is definitely a link.

I have zero christian education, but with my background of buddhist information and learning I’d say: when you forgive someone you positively produce virtuous karma and to whether that purifies that individual’s bad karma, I probably say no. Say you insult me and I say: ‘I forgive you’, that doesn’t mean that the individual karma of hitting or insulting the other person has been purified. I give you an example of when Mahatma Gandhi was shot. Gandhi was shot by an individual, probably under the instruction of some hindu movement. So Gandhi immediately said: ‘I have no problem with that individual’. He even instructed the government of India not to punish the person who shot him and then he died by saying: ‘Ram Ram’, the hindu equivalent of saying: ‘God, God’. Right? For that individual who killed Gandhi, and who was forgiven by Gandhi, the karma of killing Gandhi was not banished by that at all, nor is the collective karma of those involved behind gone.

Audience: If you forgive someone else’s un-virtuous deeds, does it mean that purifies your own un-virtuous deeds?

Rinpoche: I doubt it. You build a positive karma, but I don’t think you purify your negative karma. That is my view. You can use that as a purification, use it as an antidote action for purification of negative karma.

The buddhist background is this: to purify you need to apply four powers: 1) the power of regret, 2) the power of repentance, 3) the power of an anti-dote action, 4) the power of the base, which means seeking refuge and generating love-compassion.

So if you just forgive somebody else, you only have the anti-dote action, but you don’t have the others. That is why I said, forgiveness alone might not purify the individual karma, but you can use it, because if you build the other powers, it will work. So I hope it is a little clear.

Okay, that much for tonight. As many of us have a buddhist background, let us chant a few mantras. If you chant a mantra, it does not mean you become a buddhist or you are made a buddhist. Okay? Don’t worry about it. Sometimes people like Buddha’s experience he shared, but then if you practice buddhism get scared as though you got 2500 years old clothes to put on. Buddhism is very interesting; there is no missionary policy at all. To convert people is not our job. So don’t worry. If one does practice, it is very beneficial for the individual. If you want to practice, we provide you the opportunity. That opportunity again does not necessarily make you a buddhist. We are not going to shave you hair. A few weeks ago, when Allen Ginsberg was here, a friend of mine said: ‘Well, interesting that Allen Ginsberg is a buddhist’. Then the same fellow said: ‘I understand Philip Glass is a buddhist too’ and then he said: ‘I realize Richard Geer is also a buddhist’ and I replied: ‘A buddhist is not an untouchable’.

If you have no objection for mantras, I am sure you have no objection to meditation. It is interesting to notice that the last couple of years at Harvard university meditation is introduced as a treatment.

Since our subject is love and compassion we chant the mantra of love-compassion: Om mani padme hum, also known as ‘the Tibetan mantra’. There also is a feminine part, of the love-compassion which is Tara. Tara is particularly very good for healing. Her mantra is: Om tare tutare ture soha. [chanting]

Now we should dedicate. You people sat difficulty, we worked hard, we talked about the dharma, we talked about virtue and non-virtue, positive and negative karma, habitual patterns and all this. We created a lot of good virtues so we should dedicate that.

We dedicate it for the benefit of all sentient beings, wishing all sentient beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, wishing all sentient beings joyfulness and the causes of joyfulness. That is love and compassion. That is what you wish. Those who are familiar with Jewel Heart, I request to chant the Migtsema.