Archive Result

34

Soundfile 20091113GRAANL1

Transcriber Hartmut

00:00 Heart Sutra, lineage prayer, mandala offering, sang gye chö dang….

19:47

Do kindly generate pure motivation, as normally described in the lam rim teaching. If you can’t do that, then think at least that for the benefit of all living beings you would like to obtain the stage of total buddhahood.

0:20

For this purpose you would like to listen to this teaching. The teaching you are listening to is the lam rim, the road map to total enlightenment. That has 8 qualities and 4 special significant points. These are taught in the lam rim teachings, so I will not mention them here again and count them and all that. But all the lam rims have these qualities.

Not only that, this is the highway through which all the buddhas have travelled and reached to their destination. In other words it is the millions of people who have gone through a great spiritual path and obtained the results.

21:47

Particularly it is the heart practice of the great Indian Mahapandit Atisha and Jamgön Lama Tsongkhapa, the great master and founder of the Genden Kagyu tradition. This is very important. A number of people think this is “just lam rim”, so not so important. They think it is the usual Gelugpa chit chat. People sometimes say that. But it is not. Without lam rim no one can really achieve anything, even the most profound of the profound. Some say that they methods that if you meditate for the whole night, then the next morning you are enlightened. That is probably a hoax. But still, anyone who claims that with their methods you can get high attainments, without lam rim they are not going to get anywhere. Even today it is very popular in the United States to do dzog chen. There you start immediately with something very advanced, but gradually you are led back and start on the lam rim path. Many of you went through the dzog chen practice, so you know. The language used here is drö pa chig pai lam, the only path that all fully enlightened buddhas have traveled. What makes a difference to our lives? The lam rim, more so than the vajrayana path. Whether the vajrayana path turns out to be good or bad, right or wrong, profound or not so profound, depends on how much you do here with the lam rim. If this is well established then everything will be all right. If this is not established then no matter what you do, mantra, yantra or tantra, will not work. They all function that way.

There is a Tibetan saying,

Sang wa dü pa mi sap te

Kyab dro sing sum sa ba yin

Guhyasamaja is not so profound,

But the three words of refuge are.

So this is where we make a difference in our lives. By the time when you reach to the level of Guhyasamaja you are doing something else. It is not going to work well without this. Also you heard the expression “building an ice castle.” That means building without a foundation. If you build and ice castle and the weather turns hot it will melt. In old Tibet, on the 15th day, the full moon day of the first lunar month in the city of Lhasa they used to construct these huge butter decorated offerings. We called them chö nga chöpa - offerings of the 15th day. Tsongkhapa started the Mön lam festival and that happened to start on that day. So these were huge butter sculptures, two, three stories high. These offerings were only put up at night, because during the day time the sun will shine and the butter offerings will melt. In Tibet they didn’t have those chemicals and preservatives that makes it last longer. It was just butter. So it could only be displayed at night. So people used to say:

“If the 15th day offerings are so great, show your face in the sun shine.”

They can’t, because then they are going to melt. And like that, that’s exactly what spiritual ice castles are all about. So really, to make a difference, to get yourself out of suffering, to get to total nirvana, this is the path you have to take. This is the path that makes a difference to our lives. This is the path that makes a difference to our thoughts and ideas.

The most detailed lam rim is the lam rim chenmo by Jamgön Lama Tsongkhapa and then there are a lot of other lam rims, and a particularly wonderful one is Kyabje Pabongkha’s Liberation in the Palm of your Hand, which is commented on by Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche and draws on the 8 great commentaries on lam rim and thereby becomes the 9th. These lam rims are very useful, but a little detailed. So here we are using the Panchen Lama’s nyur lam. For that we have the following 2 main outlines:

Talking about the lineage master, the stages of the path and their order

After understanding, actually developing ourselves.

We talked about how the teaching is true and authentic based on the Buddha’s experience. Tibetans have a saying: if your water is good water, it must come from the glaciers. Tibetans live in the high mountains and all the rivers are coming from the snow mountains, the glaciers. If it is good water, the source must be the snow mountains. It is not just a little spring here and there, because then sometimes it may be good quality, sometimes not. Sometimes a lot of water will come, sometimes it may go a little dry. So a steady, reliable, good quality is when it comes from the glaciers, from the mountains. That is Tibetan culture. The earlier Indian master, when the first taught the Tibetans they told them, “When you want good water, you go and get the water that comes from the glaciers. Likewise, if you want to get good dharma, you have to get the dharma that comes from Buddha.” So if it is not based on the Buddha’s experience it is not accepted in Buddhism. Period. That goes for Tibetan Buddhism, South East Asian Buddhism and every other tradition of Buddhism. Buddha himself never taught anything that was not based on his knowledge and experience. Buddhism is nothing but Buddha’s personal experience of developing himself. He was just a human being, like ourselves. He happened to be an early Indian prince. Still, he was just a human being, someone who developed his personal experience. He then shared that with others, which is his teaching. That became Buddhism. So if a teaching is not within that, no matter whatever it is, it is not accepted as part of Buddhism. Traditionally, that’s how it goes. Every lam rim teaching therefore, will say that it is coming from Buddha. In order to prove that they talk about the lineage masters. Buddha taught this person and that person. Then they repeated it to others and those others then passed it on again and so on throughout the generations. So there are a lot of Indian names, followed by a lot of Tibetan names. Reading all these names will not make much sense to you. It is like somebody telling me, “There was John and after him came Mary. After her came another John” and so on. That would just make me confused and I don’t even know which John and which Mary. The same thing is happening to you with the Indian and Tibetan names. If you have all the time you can find the names listed in the detailed lineage prayers. Look in there and you will know. But there is not much point in telling you that Losang Thöndrup came, then Losang Paljor came, and then Losang Yeshe and then Yeshe Thubten came and so on.

But one thing is very important: the lineage is the transmission from one living human being to another living human being. One perfect human being delivered the message to another living human being and so on. Two things are happening here:

There is the continuation of the message from person to person

The lineage is not interrupted or disrupted.

Our current generation and the one before us are the only ones that could use tape recorders and VCRs and CDs and mp3s. Before that those were not there. Whatever they knew they gave in their teachings. Somebody would take notes and later the books came out. Besides that, the books also came with the oral transmission and the teaching lineage. So it was recorded plus relied on the transmission from human being to human being. Today, we have all these different gadgets and electronic ways of preserving. However, the preserving only of those teaching may only benefit future generations from the information point of view. But that’s not going to have benefit for people to develop.

So it is the job of you people to not only listen to me but on the basis of that and the books and transcripts, give teachings yourselves in the future to the future generations. When you do that there will be the continuation of the lineage. If you break this and only the recordings remain then it won’t work any more.

With only very few exceptions the earlier masters were such that they really trusted and relied on human beings more than spirits. In Tibetan Buddhist teachings there may be a few revealed hidden treasures. But mostly it is one human being passing the message to another human being. That is the continuation of the lineage. So these lineage masters become the backbone of our practice.

0:41

Developing ourselves.