The Moment Has No Story
By Dza Kilung Rinpoche

When we speak of being present, "in the moment," that period can be of different lengths for different people or at different times. The moment could be long or short. The important thing is that the moment has no story: "What is my meditation?" "What has happened?" "What will happen?" It leaves no trace of those kinds of questions. Just be in the present as you experience it now. That is how we rest in nonmeditation.

Source: The Relaxed Mind, A Seven-Step Method for Deepening Meditation Practice, p. 116

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Brahmajala Sutra
Moral conduct of the Bodhisattvas
By Charles Muller and Kenneth K. Tanaka

Here then is the full text of the Brahma Net Sutra. We hope that by studying it, perhaps a few readers may discover karmic affinities with the Bodhisattva precepts and resolve to accept them. Observing these precepts, they may develop, in time, samadhi and wisdom -- this is the universal path of cultivation laid down by the Buddha. Failing that, perhaps the sutra can awaken in the reader the compassionate ideals of the Bodhisattvas, those true heirs of the Dharma, as they go about their silent work of rescuing sentient beings and cultivating the Bodhi Mind -- the resolve to attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all.

A disciple of the Buddha should always teach the Bodhisattva precepts to save and protect sentient beings. On the day his father, mother, and siblings die, or on the anniversary of their death, he should invite Dharma Masters to explain the Bodhisattva sutras and precepts. This will generate merits and virtues and help the deceased either to achieve rebirth in the Pure Lands and see the Buddhas or to secure a good rebirth in the human or celestial realms. (Secondary Precept 20).

May all sentient beings nurture the Bodhi Mind and swiftly attain Buddhahood.

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https://bdkamerica.org/download/1959

Free Buddha Dharma Abecedarian Poetry

The Rose Apple Tree: In Praise of the Great Omniscient One
༄༅། །ཀུན་མཁྱེན་ཆེན་པོ་ལ་བསྟོད་པ་ཛམྦུའི་འཁྲི་ཤིང་།

This ode to the most preeminent figure in the history of the Nyingma tradition, Longchenpa (Longchen Rabjam, 1308–1364) is one of several abecedarian poems that Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo composed.

The poem pays homage to key aspects of Longchenpa’s life story, from his time as a wandering yogi to his extensive time in retreat, while focusing especially on his accomplishments as an adept in the practices of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection.

Free download available:

English:
https://www.khyentsevision.org/static/published-pdfs/B55_The_Rose_Apple_Tree.pdf

Tibetan:
https://www.khyentsevision.org/static/tibetan-pdfs/B55.pdf

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༄༅། །རྗེ་བཙུན་སྒྲོལ་མའི་སྙིང་ཏིག་ལས༔ རྩ་བ་རྡོ་རྗེའི་ཚིག་རྐང་༔

Root Vajra Verses from the Heart Essence of Ārya Tārā

In 1843, when Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo was twenty-four years old, he visited the sacred place of Shang Zabulung in Central Tibet. On the journey back, he and his attendant, Tsultrim Gyatso, stopped in a meadow for a meal. Khyentse Wangpo clearly perceived a cycle of treasure scrolls hidden in a neighboring cliff, but he lacked the means to retrieve them. Instead, Guru Padmasambhava and Khandro Yeshe Tsogyal appeared before him, blessed him, and the words of the cycle appeared clearly in his mind. From this visionary encounter, he wrote down the Root Vajra Verses from the Heart Essence of Ārya Tārā, a treasure revelation extracted from the treasury of wisdom mind. While Khyentse Wangpo was writing, the guardian of this treasure cycle appeared before him in the guise of a layman and handed Khyentse Wangpo a statue of Ārya Tārā. This cycle is therefore classified as both a mind treasure and an earth treasure. In the colophon of this text, Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo identifies himself by his secret treasure-revealer name, Ӧsal Trulpe Dorje (Luminous Emanated Vajra). These root vajra verses serve as the basis for six related texts in the same cycle, including a feast offering, a supplication prayer, and empowerment texts, which Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo composed. These texts are included in the Seven Transmissions (Kabab Dun) compendium.

The text is divided into three sections: (1) the origin of the teaching, with an homage and overview; (2) the main section, which describes how the initial empowerment should be given by a qualified teacher, how the practitioner should perform the general generation stage practices, and how to undertake the advanced practices of the completion stage; and (3) the concluding verses with a prophecy.

Free download here:

English:

https://www.khyentsevision.org/static/published-pdfs/D109_Root_Vajra_Verses.pdf

Tibetan:

https://www.khyentsevision.org/static/tibetan-pdfs/D109.pdf

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When we are able to recognize the potential for learning provided by such a situation, it becomes much easier to open ourselves to what is being communicated.

Meanwhile, adopting a mind that is free from grasping is a direct antidote to a narrow and fixed perspective. This mind can generally be developed either formally through awareness meditation or informally through mindfulness of the present moment. Either way, the essence of this practice is to adopt the capacity to simply observe what is happening without getting carried away by excessive judgments or other discursive thoughts.

Curiosity

As you begin to open yourself more and more to the lessons that life has to offer, you will naturally be influenced by the information you take in. When new ideas are introduced into the mind, they go through a process of integration in which the mind tries to reconcile what this new information means in relation to existing ideas.

At this point you have a choice. You can choose to disregard the new information, in which case you are left no better off than when you started, or you can choose to actively seek to understand the implications of this new information, which will lead you to a more robust and integrated mind. If you choose the latter, you will need to develop the quality of curiosity.

Curiosity is an inquisitive mind that desires to understand. In a way we can say that curiosity is a reaction to uncertainty. When such a mind sees two conflicting ideas, it desires to reconcile the uncertainty regarding which idea makes more sense. This leads to the asking of questions, and when we ask questions, we get answers. The new information these answers provide helps us to fill in holes in our understanding, leading to the removal of uncertainty.

To cultivate such a mind we need to nurture our thirst for understanding. We need to counteract the passive mind that complacently just absorbs things. This can be done by engaging with each opportunity as though it were the missing piece in a great puzzle. We develop joy in the very process of working things out and revel in the challenges that life presents us with. In this way, everything becomes fascinating, because everything has the capacity to teach us something. This is the mind of curiosity.

Flexibility

The previous three qualities of tolerance, receptivity, and curiosity combine together to form a powerful engine for the acquisition of information. A person who has cultivated all these qualities will be very much like a sponge. They will pull in as much as they can whenever they can, and because they actively engage in clarifying their understanding, the quality of their view will be very strong and very broad.

Having such a view provides a practitioner with a very unique opportunity. The more you learn about diverse approaches to similar problems, the more flexibility of mind you are able to exhibit. You can start to see how different ideas are more suited to different conditions. So when those conditions arise, you are able to respond in an appropriate manner that is capable of optimizing the benefit for yourself and others.

This sort of flexibility arises out of an awareness that clearly perceives what is going on in any given moment. This discriminating awareness can be cultivated by exposing the mind to a wide variety of circumstances and then looking at those circumstances from many angles. Doing so reduces clinging to reality as being just one way and promotes a malleable mind that can adapt very easily to variation.

Developing an unbiased attitude does not mean we have to think of all paths as being equal, as this is simply not true. Each has its own flavor and strengths, and therefore what we are trying to do is develop greater awareness of what diversity has to offer. Our aim is to clearly distinguish between their differences, respecting each as a skillful means to guide different sentient beings toward greater happiness.

PRACTICE

Opening Up to Others

In a relaxed position, establish a neutral mind through the practice of mindfulness of breathing.

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The Dhāraṇī “Surūpa”

སུ་རཱུ་པ་ཞེས་བྱ་བའི་གཟུངས།
Surūpānāma­dhāraṇī

This text consists of a short dhāraṇī followed by its application, a food offering made to the pretas (hungry spirits). The text says that by the power of the spell, the offering will be made manifold and there will be many future benefits for the person performing the rite.

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https://read.84000.co/data/toh540_84000-the-dharani-surupa.pdf

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Pema Chödrön on 4 Keys to Waking Up

Ani Pema says “Walking the walk means you’re very genuine and down to earth. You take the teachings as good medicine for the things that are confusing to you and for the suffering of your life.”

Free download available:

https://pemachodronfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/4-Keys-to-Waking-Up.pdf

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The spiritual journey, then, is a journey of detachment, a process of learning how to let go. All of our problems, miseries, and unhappiness are caused by fixation—latching onto things and not being able to release them. First we have to let go of fixation on material things. This does not necessarily mean jettisoning all our material possessions, but it implies that we should not look to material things for lasting happiness. Normally, our position in life, our family, our standing in the community, and so forth, are perceived to be the source of our happiness. This perspective has to be reversed, according to spiritual teachings, by relinquishing our fixation on material things.

Letting go of fixation is effectively a process of learning to be free, because every time we let go of something, we become free of it. Whatever we fixate upon limits us because fixation makes us dependent upon something other than ourselves. Each time we let go of something, we experience another level of freedom.

Eventually, in order to be totally free, we learn to let go of concepts. Ultimately, we need to relinquish our fixation on the reification of concepts, of things being “this” or “that.” Thinking of this and that binds us to a particular way of experiencing things. Even spiritual experiences will not be given complete, spontaneous, unmediated expression as long as the subtlest kind of conceptual distinction is present. Experience will still be mediated, adulterated, and tainted by all kinds of psychic content when we make discriminations. Therefore, it will remain impossible ever to be truly free.

The final step in the process of letting go is relinquishing the idea that material corruption and spiritual freedom are unequivocally opposed to one another and that we have to give up the former to attain the latter. While this is an important distinction to observe at the beginning of the spiritual journey, we have to overcome that duality. We have to transcend both the seduction of samsaric pleasure that turns out to be so illusory and the seduction of our spiritual goal that appears to be offering eternal happiness. Once the pull between these two poles is harmonized and transcended, we are ready to return home.

The Fruition of the Spiritual Path

The ultimate goal of the spiritual journey is to realize the union of your mind and ultimate reality. You discover eventually that not only are you in reality, but that you also embody that reality. Your ordinary body becomes the body of a buddha, your ordinary speech becomes the speech of a buddha, and your ordinary mind becomes the mind of a buddha. This is the great transition that you have to make, relinquishing your fixation on the separation of samsaric beings and buddhas. When we can talk about them as ultimately the same, when this actual transformation occurs within an individual, it is a truly great occurrence. It is remarkable because an ordinary, confused being still retains that preexisting continuity between an ordinary being and an enlightened being, in the sense that what you become is what you have always been. At the end of the journey, you are simply returning home.

Yet the journey itself was absolutely necessary. It was necessary to leave your familiar environment and venture through various trials and tribulations. It was necessary to deal with many unexpected things, to grapple with your inner demonic forces. It was necessary to go through the spiritual struggle and engage in vigorous disciplines. Spiritual struggle is valuable for the purification of the mind. Your mind has to be cleansed of the delusions and conflicting emotions that are the product of your karma, the product of the negative thoughts and actions that have accumulated in your mindstream over a long period of time.

Letting Go of Spiritual Experience

Stop clinging to peak moments and open to true realization.
By Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Spiritual Experiences and Realizations

There will be all sorts of experiences on the spiritual path. Positive periods of development—those that are reassuring and comforting—are an important part of the process. It is important to realize, however, that even positive experiences will fluctuate. We will rarely, if ever, perceive a steady development of them, precisely because experiences are fickle by nature. Enjoying a series of good experiences does not ensure that they will continue indefinitely; they may stop suddenly. Even so, they remain an important part of spiritual practice, not least because they help to maintain our motivation to continue practicing.

The way in which these positive experiences arise also varies enormously. You may have some amazingly moving experiences, something like a spiritual awakening that appears to arise out of the blue. In fact, such experiences do not really come from nowhere; psychic conditions will always precede them, although they appear to our conscious experience as independent. They can also vanish just as quickly as they appear. At other times, certain experiences will grow over a period of time, peak, and then gradually fade away again.

As spiritual practitioners, we are instructed not to attach too much significance to these experiences. The advice is to resist the temptation to become fixated on the experiences themselves. Experiences will come and go. Each experience has to be let go of, or the mind will simply close down in its fixation on that experience, leaving little or no room for new experiences to arise. This is because your fixation will encourage worries and doubts to arise in the mind and interfere with the development process. If there is no fixation involved in the process, positive spiritual experiences will start to lead you to spiritual realizations.

In Buddhism, we distinguish between spiritual experiences and spiritual realizations. Spiritual experiences are usually more vivid and intense than realizations because they are generally accompanied by physiological and psychological changes. Realizations, on the other hand, may be felt, but the experience is less pronounced. Realization is about acquiring insight. Therefore, while realizations arise out of our spiritual experiences, they are not identical to them. Spiritual realizations are considered vastly more important because they cannot fluctuate.

The distinction between spiritual experiences and realizations is continually emphasized in Buddhist thought. If we avoid excessively fixating on our experiences, we will be under less stress in our practice. Without that stress, we will be better able to cope with whatever arises, the possibility of suffering from psychic disturbances will be greatly reduced, and we will notice a significant shift in the fundamental texture of our experience.
Fixation on our experiences is seen as another variation of fixation on the self.

There are many accounts in Tibetan Buddhist literature of how spiritual disturbances may arise, but all point to fixation on experiences as the cause. Fixation on our experiences is seen as another variation of fixation on the self.

In the overall context of the spiritual journey, it is important to remember that self-transformation is a continuous process, not a onetime event. One cannot say, “I used to be a nonspiritual person, but now I have been transformed into a spiritual person. My old self is dead.” We are constantly being transformed when we travel on the path. While we may be the same individual on one level, on another level we are different. There is always continuity, and yet at each major turning point on the journey we have become transformed because certain habits have dropped away. The spiritual journey is dynamic and always tends forward because we are not fixating on things.

Letting Go

Chakrasamvara (Tibetan: khor lo dem chog. English: the Wheel of Bliss). The principal tantra of the Anuttarayoga Wisdom (mother) classification of the Vajrayana Buddhist Tradition. Chakrasamvara is one of the most popular deities in Tantric Buddhism in the Himalayan regions and Tibet after the 11th century. He can appear in several dozen different forms, from simple to complex and peaceful to wrathful, which makes it necessary to rely on the descriptive literature in the Sanskrit and Tibetan languages to identify his various forms.

Adding to the complexity, there are more than fifty different traditions of these forms in Tibetan Buddhism. The different forms are meant to emphasize different types of meditation practice that are suited for specific types of emotional and psychological characteristics in the tantric practitioners who take on these complex practices.