I’m going to begin by paying homage to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, and then we will recite the Heart Sutra, this heart advice of Buddha. This is the fundamental meditation in life, protecting our mind not only from the problems of this life but from the oceans of samsaric suffering and its causes, karma and delusions, and bringing us not only ultimate liberation, with total cessation of all suffering and its causes but full enlightenment, the state of mind that is perfected in cessation of all the disturbing-thought obscurations, which mainly interfere with achieving liberation for oneself, and of all the subtle obscurations, which mainly interfere with achieving the state of omniscience, and perfected in all the qualities of realization.

This meditation is like an atomic bomb in destroying our enemy, which is not outside but within us, on our mental continuum. This enemy is not physical but mental; it is our mind, but not all of our mind. The enemy is our wrong concepts, which give us wrong views and which act to obscure and disturb our mental continuum. These are the delusions, or obscuring, disturbing negative attitudes. The Tibetan term nyon mong ba is normally translated as “disturbing attitude,” but I added one more of its harmful functions, “obscuring.” And that’s exactly what it does to us. Instead of awakening us, it obscures our mind. These obscuring, disturbing negative attitudes, these delusions, harm us.

Ignorance, anger, attachment and so forth are like the foundation delusions; the six root delusions and twenty secondary delusions are like the basis. There are then many other negative thoughts related to ignorance, to anger and to attachment.

These delusions obscure our mind to see the nature of phenomena, even the nature of the self. They block us from seeing not only the conventional nature of the self, the nature that is true for the all-obscuring mind, but also the ultimate nature of the self, the nature that is true for the mind realizing absolute truth. The delusions never allow us to be fully enlightened, to be omniscient, and they don’t allow us even to be free forever from the oceans of samsaric suffering, to be completely free from the obscuring, disturbing negative attitudes and their cause, their seeds, which are of the nature of imprints. On the basis of this, we are blocked from having attainments of the path: the five paths to liberation, which contain the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment within them; the five Mahayana paths and ten bhumis; and also the tantric path, or Vajrayana, the path of Secret Mantra. We are obscured from having those attainments, from being able to achieve enlightenment within one life or even much quicker than that. You can achieve enlightenment in one life by practicing the lower tantras; but by practicing Highest Yoga Tantra, you’re able to achieve enlightenment much more quickly: in the brief lifetime of a degenerate time, within twelve years or, as mentioned by the great, enlightened being Pabongka, even within three years.

So, meditating on the Heart Sutra is like an atomic bomb in destroying our enemy, the delusions. We will then do the Lion-face Dakini practice to pacify any outer and inner obstacles. It is because of inner obstacles that there are outer obstacles. Because of our delusions, we receive outer obstacles from human beings and non-human beings, such as nagas, that make us unable to practice Dharma and things like that.

We will then make strong requests from the bottom of our heart to the lineage lamas of the lam-rim to grant us realizations and to pacify all our obstacles, all our wrong concepts, starting with our wrong thoughts towards the virtuous friend. I’m talking about the wrong concepts that need to be purified, such as the thought of the virtuous friend as ordinary. Virtuous friend means your root guru, the one who reveals the path to liberation and to enlightenment, who reveals the unmistaken path to happiness—not just temporary happiness, the happiness of future lives, but also the ultimate happiness of liberation from samsara and especially of full enlightenment.

Other wrong concepts that need to be purified are self-cherishing thought and the attachment that clings to samsara and samsaric pleasures, samsaric perfections. It’s like seeing a very filthy place, filled with poo-poo (this is the new English word that I learnt last year or at the beginning of this year—I didn’t know it before that), with a lot of harmful insects, poisonous snakes or dangerous animals such as tigers, as beautiful. It’s an ugly, disgusting, terrifying place, but you think it’s clean and very beautiful. You look at that place as wonderful, as a beautiful garden with only nice things to see, hear and smell—the total opposite of how it is.

With this belief about the place, when you then go there, you find that you have totally cheated yourself, totally deceived yourself. You find a dirty place filled with harm. You get a lot of disease and get bitten by insects and snakes.

In other words, it’s like thinking a pit of fire is a beautiful garden or a beautiful beach. When you then run to that beautiful beach to jump into the ocean, you find that it’s just a deep fiery pit.

Many other examples are used to show how grasping at samsara and samsaric happiness is mistaken and what happens when you allow attachment to samsara and samsaric pleasures to arise. One example is licking honey from the blade of a knife. Thinking only of the honey and forgetting the sharpness of the blade, you lick the honey and cut yourself. By thinking of the honey and not thinking of how it might be harmful to you, you cheat yourself. The situation is not really what you think.

Here we are talking about clinging, or attachment, to samsara and samsaric pleasures, or perfections. In Tibetan the term is kor wäi phün tshog; kor wäi means cycling one and phün tshog means perfection. So, it refers to food, clothing, housing and all the other material possessions.

We are hallucinated; we don’t know what samsara is and how samsara is in the nature of suffering. The house is not samsara, the country is not samsara. So, what exactly is samsara? Samsara is the continuity of the contaminated aggregates caused by karma and delusion. Some lamas add “birth” to this definition and say that samsara is the continuity of the birth of these contaminated aggregates caused by karma and delusion. Basically it means the same thing: the continuity of the aggregates from life to life. The physical body does not continue from life to life; the aggregate of the mind is the one that has continued during beginningless rebirths, is continuing now and will continue forever. It is not that we will always have the body; it doesn’t go into the intermediate state. Our present body doesn’t go to the next life. It disintegrates; its continuity stops. So, what goes from life to life is the mind, which is under the control of karma and delusion and contaminated by the seed of delusion. This continuity of these aggregates is samsara.

Lama Tsongkhapa mentioned in Lamrim Chenmo, The Great Commentary of the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, “the part of the continuity of the contaminated aggregates caused by karma and delusion.” Why did he use part there? If one of us here achieves liberation from samsara in this life, there’s no continuity of that person’s aggregates after this life. Even though that person has aggregates now, there’s no continuity of them going to the next life. Because they achieved liberation in this life, they don’t have reincarnation under the control of karma and delusion. They don’t die and reincarnate again and again; they have ceased that circle in this life. There are five paths to achieve liberation, and with achievement of the fourth one, the path of meditation, that meditator’s aggregates do not continue; they cease in this life. Using the word part refers particularly to meditators who are attainers of the path of meditation. For them, there is no rebirth again, no continuity of the aggregates; that has ceased.

For all the others who are not like that, who have to reincarnate again under the control of karma and delusion, you can say “the continuity of the contaminated aggregates caused by karma and delusion.”

That is exactly what samsara is. What causes the continuity? Karma and delusion. What causes you to circle in samsara? What causes you to circle in the six realms, one after the other? Karma and delusion. And who is circling? You.

It is only when you have ceased karma, or action, and the obscuring, disturbing negative attitudes, as well as their seed, the negative imprint, that you can have a holiday. At that time you have the real holiday, because you are free from suffering forever. You are free from suffering not just for a few hours or a week or a month, but forever.

One thing I want to mention here is that such an occasion as this is very rare, very precious. It’s not because I’m special, but because the Dharma, the Buddhadharma, that I’m talking about is very rare and precious. (Of course, if I make mistakes, you can correct me; and if I remember any mistakes, I will correct them myself.) Just because the subject is the Dharma, this is a very precious time, a very important time, for us. It is not that we have the opportunity to listen to teachings all the time. Since this is a very rare opportunity, paying attention is very important, even if you cannot understand the meaning. Otherwise, if you don’t pay attention (and this applies not only to the meditation session but even to the talks), if you are physically here in this gompa but you are thinking about something else—I’m not sure what Mexican people would be thinking about—about something at home or about going to the mountains or to the beach or about traveling to the Rocky Mountains or somewhere else or about climbing Mount Everest, you won’t hear the teachings. And if you don’t hear the teachings, if your body stays here while your mind stays at home, it won’t leave any positive imprints, which have unbelievable benefits in the future in regard to meeting Dharma and being easily able to have extensive and deep understanding and realizations. This won’t happen. Awakening yourself from the wrong concepts, from the hallucination, and removing the hallucinated view that projects the hallucination won’t happen. You will continue to live in the hallucination of true existence; everything will appear truly existent, you will believe it to be real. You won’t become free from this ignorance, which is the major one. This ignorance is what ties us to samsara, causing us continuously to be reborn and die in the six realms, one after another.

This is how we have been during beginningless rebirths; this is how it came about that we have been suffering. And if we don’t practice Dharma in this life, if we don’t do something now to change this mind, if we don’t make some development in this heart, we will miss this opportunity, which we have found just once, this life. If we miss this opportunity and don’t get to practice Dharma, it’s not sure when we will have another opportunity. We have just come from the lower realms—from the hell, hungry ghost or animal realm—and we will again go back to our resident place, the lower realms. It is extremely rare to be a human being. To receive even an ordinary human or deva rebirth is extremely rare, because it only comes from the cause of pure morality, and living in pure morality is not easy. If you look at others in the world and if you examine your own life, your own mind, you find that living in pure morality is extremely difficult and rare.

First of all, you have to understand that the cause of suffering is nonvirtue and that the cause of happiness is virtue, or morality, and that a good rebirth has to come from morality. It takes time to meet Dharma; it’s uncertain when you will meet Dharma and come to understand this point. Even when you meet the Dharma, it takes time for your mind to come to know this point. It is extremely difficult, extremely rare.

Even when you come to hear about this point and know about it intellectually, it still doesn’t mean that you have faith in it. That can take a long time. If you have strong imprints of Dharma from the past, you will immediately understand and have faith in this point; but if you don’t have much Dharma imprint from the past and you have more imprints of heresy and other wrong concepts, you will find it very difficult, even though you hear Dharma teachings about karma, about how the cause of happiness is virtue, about how a good rebirth means that you can be born in a pure land of buddha where you can become enlightened and that once you are born there it is impossible for you to be reborn in the lower realms or how a good rebirth means being born in the deva or human realms, taking birth in the body of a happy transmigratory being…. This is the body of the happy, not hippy, transmigratory being—the body of the hippy transmigratory being happened many years ago, somewhere around 1963, I think. The hippy period started around that time, and now it has again changed from that. I saw many hippies a few years later when I was in Kathmandu.

In 1963 I think I was in the school for young lamas in Delhi. It was a school for young lamas from the four traditions—Sakya, Kagyu, Nyingma and Gelug—started by Frieda Bedi, the second Western Buddhist nun. The first Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition was called Sister Vajra,. She lived for a long time in Darjeeling, where she built a small cottage, and also lived in Varanasi. She was ordained by the great lama, Domo Geshe Rinpoche, in whose monastery in Tibet I became a monk. She passed away in Darjeeling. Frieda Bedi, the second Western Buddhist nun, started a summer school for young lamas, and ran it three times, I think. The first one ran for six months in Delhi. She then moved it to Dalhousie, where she ran it maybe three times in the summertime. It was closed in the wintertime, I think, because it was extremely cold there.

I was in the school in Delhi for six months and also spent six months at Dalhousie. She wrote a letter asking me to join the school when I was at Buxa in West Bengal. There were about 1,500 monks there, mostly monks from the large monastic universities of Sera, Ganden and Drepung who had escaped from Lhasa, but also monks from other parts of Tibet. The large monastic universities were where there was the most extensive and deepest, like the depth of the ocean, learning of Buddhist philosophy of sutra, and also tantra on the basis of that. The study of tantra happened while you were in the monastery but especially afterwards when you entered the tantric college.

After they came from Tibet, many monks went or were sent to different parts of India to make roads, especially at the Indian border with Tibet where the roads were part of the preparations to protect India from Mainland China. Only those who wanted to continue their studies stayed at Buxa in West Bengal, close to the Bhutanese border with India. Buxa is an unbelievable place, though I don’t know in what way you will think it unbelievable. Anyway, it is unbelievably hot. It was so hot that many monks died from the heat, because they had just come from a very nice, cold place. The monks also found the food difficult—I don’t know whether it was because of the food that was actually given or because of the change of food from Tibet. It was a place where many people died.

When India was under British rule, Buxa was the place where Mahatma Gandhi-ji, Prime Minister Nehru and many other Indian leaders were imprisoned. On the outside it looked exactly like a prison. There were watch towers where the police stood guard.

Where Prime Minister Nehru had been imprisoned became a monks’ dormitory. It was a very long room, so about sixty or seventy monks’ beds were lined up in it. It wasn’t a big space like this. There was only a very small space between the beds, just enough space to walk. There were also monks in beds outside of the building as there wasn’t enough space inside. Outside there was a very small courtyard surrounded by barbwire.

In the summertime, the leeches would come. When you went to the toilet, you would come back with leeches. And sometimes there were snakes. They would sometimes fall down from their nest in the ceiling onto the monks’ beds. In the summertime snakes would also sometimes come in through the door.

The place was full of mosquitoes and red bed bugs. The monks would go into the forest to cut bamboo, which they would flatten to make into beds, and many bed bugs lived under the bamboo beds. When you went to sleep, you would put a mosquito net over the bed, and the bed bugs lived in the corners of the net. That was their home. As long as the light was on, they wouldn’t come out, but the minute the light went off, they would start coming down. You would see the big bumps.

Even though it was such a harmful place, the monks who were living there did unbelievable study and practice. There was a whole program all day long, one thing after the other. In the early morning they would memorize root texts and commentaries, then go to receive teachings from their own gurus. Each monastery had its own place where the monks would do prayers and debate. Study involved debate, whether in a class or person-to-person, with one monk standing up asking questions and the other sitting down giving the answers.

First there was a class, and you would do one or two hours of debate in the class. There were six or seven different classes according to the different philosophical texts. The monks would then gather to do different prayers to pacify outer obstacles and delusions, the outer and inner obstacles to being able to complete their study of Dharma and attaining the path to enlightenment. There would also be prayers for people who were sick or having other difficulties or who had died. There were many requests for prayers for people who were living or had died. After that, there would be person-to-person debate.

In that way, you would gradually complete the five major sutra texts. When you finished studying them, you would have an examination in front of all the monks, including the abbots, many learned monks and a representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Here I’m talking about what happened in Buxa, not in Lhasa in Tibet. The system in Tibet was for one high lama to come and examine the monks, who would then get their degree.

You then enter the tantric college, where you study all the extensive and very deep meanings of the tantric path, including learning the artwork, such as the drawing of mandalas, and how to do the rituals and prayers, as well as receiving commentary on all the meanings.

In this way you would become fully qualified to guide sentient beings, with the ability to reveal whatever methods fit them. You are fully qualified to complete the path for your own enlightenment, as well as able to guide and offer extensive benefit to sentient beings.

I was supposed to do the prayers, but it became story-telling, instead of prayers. Hopefully it became a commentary to the prayers.

So, the monks studied and debated. Each monastery had its own debate place [chörak], where monks would debate until twelve o’clock at night or even later. When they then returned home, many monks would recite by heart all the many pages of text they had memorized in the morning. Sometimes they would recite three, four or five hundred pages of text. You have to recite by heart at night; otherwise, you forget. Many monks would do that until three o’clock. Those who had memorized many thousands of pages would recite them by heart until three o’clock in the morning or something like that. It would take them that long to go over the pages. So, the monks studied in an unbelievable way; they were totally absorbed in it. Even though the conditions were very bad and very harmful to life, their minds were completely engaged in Dharma, in studying the path to liberation and enlightenment, in studying how to free themselves from samsara and how to liberate others from samsaric suffering and bring them to liberation and enlightenment.

Some of the Sera Je and Sera Me monks lived in the building where they did puja. This wasn’t the only place where the Sera monks lived; they also lived in other houses. The particular building I’m talking about is where Prime Minister Nehru was imprisoned, and there was another mud house, which had much more barbed wire all around it, where Gandhi was imprisoned. This became the nunnery for some nuns who came from Tibet. There was no change to the building, but it became a nunnery because nuns lived there.

So, I don’t know now why I’m telling these stories. I’m lost. From where did it start?

[Ven. Paloma reminds Rinpoche that he was talking about the hippies.]

Oh, the hippies! Sorry, I went in another direction….

In the beginning, because the monks had just escaped from Tibet, there were no texts. All the monks had to learn, but texts were very rare, so everything had to be copied by hand. Many monks had to write out many hundreds of pages by hand, then later on they got some blocks to print the texts.

Later, when Domo Geshe Rinpoche, the great lama at whose monastery I became a monk in Tibet, was released from prison in Lhasa, he was very smart. He brought to India one truck full of the texts from our college, the philosophical texts composed by Panchen Losang Chökyi Gyaltsen. This helped very much as the monks then had more texts to study.

Anyway, Frieda Bedi went to Sri Lanka and became a Buddhist. Then, when Mainland China took over Tibet and the monks escaped from Lhasa and other parts of Tibet and came to India, at that time she was asked by Prime Minister Nehru to look after the monks at the first place they came to in India (it wasn’t Buxa but a place before that—I’ve forgotten its name). She was in charge of looking after the monks because her son, Kabir, and her daughter happened to be going to the same university as Nehru’s children. The children became friends, so that’s how Nehru and Frieda Bedi came to know each other.

Frieda Bedi came to Buxa at least two times to see all the young lamas. It happened that I was there. Later she organized a school for young lamas in Delhi. I went to the school, but I got TB at that time so I had to stay in hospital for about a month, then went back to Buxa to study.

I stayed at Buxa for eight years, but I didn’t really study. I used that time in the wrong way, making paintings and doing other things. Frieda Bedi had found some friends to help and write letters to the young lamas. I think the idea was to have some communication to help them with the Dharma and for them to help meet the needs of the young lamas while they were studying.

She found me one family from Scotland. They sent a letter only rarely, so then I would send a letter back to them. One time they sent me a kind of round box. I thought it was a machine or something like that, and I went to ask some Indian officials about it. Anyway, after we opened the box, we found it was cookies. I think they must have been some cookies that they liked.

This family had a company that employed four or five hundred people, but then some problem happened, I think. Frieda Bedi then found an old lady from England, who took care of me for seven years. When I was in school, for seven years all the TB medicines and milk came from her. At the beginning I had no idea where it came from; then later it was explained to me that it came from this old lady in London, a member of the Buddhist Society.

Because she also sent a little bit of money, Lama Yeshe and I were able to buy some vegetables and make some extra food. Lama Yeshe lived in a small bamboo hut outside the main house. Outside of the house there was a courtyard, with a bamboo hut behind it. There was a wall, then sides of bamboo and a door. It was just big enough for one bed, for one person. Inside of that was where Lama Yeshe gave teachings. He made food on one small Indian butter tin. It was empty inside; you made a hole at the top where you put a pot and a hole down the bottom where you put a small fire. The very first time I went to see Lama Yeshe and receive teachings from him, it was in that small room. Inside his room there were only two small pots and this small fire place. That’s it. There were some texts covered with plastic on the bed. The bed was made of split bamboo and covered with a Bhutanese cloth; it was quite hard, and you had to lie down on the bare wood. Behind it was a window, with an ants’ nest. Because I carried the name of “incarnate lama,” Lama would put me on his bed during teachings, and other people would sit down on the floor.

I’ll just finish talking about this. The first day I didn’t understand anything. Nothing! I think it might have been like that for the first few days for many people when they came to the Kopan Monastery meditation courses at the beginning, because of my language and also because of the lack of Dharma knowledge. There were these two things, I think. I think they understood nothing for a few days, except for what they heard in their own language from other old students, lay or Sangha.

The first day with Lama Yeshe, I didn’t understand anything. I was thinking, “Why can’t Lama teach slower?” I didn’t ask Lama, but this is what I was thinking while I was sitting there in front of Lama on the same bed.

So, I think I should tell the whole story because this becomes a teaching on karma, on your actions and the effect of your actions. It’s especially a teaching on that.

My first class was a very beginning class on philosophical study. The leader of our class had been a student of Lama Yeshe’s before, and some of the monks had been taking teachings from Lama. This class leader was pushing me very much. I already had a guru there, Geshe Rabten Rinpoche, the first teacher to begin to teach me Buddhist philosophy. Geshe Rabten had been teaching me dura, the very beginning of philosophy, which is like learning the ABC. I already had a great teacher, a great scholar and a great yogi, who had great attainments, but because he was a great scholar he had many disciples, so he didn’t have much time to teach me.

I then had another guru, one of Geshe Rabten Rinpoche’s disciples, whose name is Gen Yeshe, but he didn’t stay long at Buxa. He left to practice Dharma by living a wandering ascetic life.

The leader of my class took me to Lama Yeshe. I used to go with him outside quite often for walks or to wash in the river. So, he pushed me very much to take teachings from Lama Yeshe. I was not really planning to do so from my heart. I just went with him because I would quite often go out with him.

From Buxa, the concentration camp where the monks lived, you had to go down then go up a huge mountain where there was the house of the Sikh officer who was in charge of the camp. He had served in World War II. Outside his house was a big mango tree where the monks would usually take a rest. When we reached there, I told him, “I’m not going!” He then pushed, so I went up a little bit. I again said, “I’m not going,” but he pushed again, and I went up a little bit more. We went up, up, up, in this way. From the concentration camp, you went on a road straight up this very high mountain. First you came to where Geshe Rabten and a few other great scholars and their disciples lived. When you went up further, there was the house where the incarnation of the great enlightened being Pabongka, the author of Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, lived, along with many other incarnate lamas. So, at that time Lama Yeshe was living there.

When I reached the outside of the house, I said, “I’m still not going!” He then went inside Lama’s room. I didn’t bring any offering. It’s very, very important to make the first connection really auspicious by arranging offerings and so forth. It’s very important because it helps your progress in the realization of Dharma. However, I didn’t bring anything. The class leader then filled with rice a brass container that Nepalese use for beer or food and put five Indian rupees in it. He then tied a very short, very old scarf around it. He had brought the offerings himself, then offered them to Lama Yeshe on my behalf.

Lama Yeshe then asked him whether I had permission from Geshe Rabten, because Geshe Rabten is also Lama Yeshe’s guru. If there was no permission Lama couldn’t accept me as a disciple because I’m also a disciple of Geshe Rabten. When Lama Yeshe asked him, he said, “Yes,” so I then went inside and Lama asked me to sit down on his bed.

When I came, I wasn’t really thinking to take teachings, and I didn’t understand anything. The second day was better. Even though there had not been any real interest from my side, it happened, and then Lama Yeshe was not only a Dharma teacher but like a parent who guided me for more than twenty years. Unfortunately, because of my not having enough merit, Lama passed away when he was aged 49.

So, Lama is the founder of the FPMT organization. Many people have met the Dharma by coming to an FPMT center or meeting FPMT students and being able to hear and learn the Dharma from them. The Dharma started, the awakening, or enlightening, of the mind started, in that way, by coming to an FPMT center or meeting students from an FPMT center and learning Dharma from them. Not only for me but for so many people in different parts of the world, we have met the Dharma all by the kindness of Lama Yeshe. Even if we didn’t meet Lama Yeshe and receive teachings from him directly, we have met the Dharma through his students or through students of his students.

Anyway, I thought to mention this. When there’s karma, even though you mightn’t have any real interest, it happens. You meet because there is strong karma from past lives.

So, I was most unbelievably fortunate to meet Lama and then to receive teachings from and be guided by Lama. I can’t do much, but any little benefit that I can offer to this world is from Lama Yeshe’s kindness.

I think that’s it. So, we’ll do the prayer next time. Okay, thank you.

“Jang chhub sem chhog rin po chhe….

“Due to all the merits of the three times collected by me and by others, may I, the merely imputed one, achieve Lama Tsongkhapa’s enlightenment, which exists but which is a merely imputed one, and lead all the sentient beings, who are merely imputed ones, to that Lama Tsongkhapa’s enlightenment, which is a merely imputed one, by myself alone, who exists but who is a merely imputed one.”

Sorry, I got confused about the time. Okay, thank you.