REST IN PEACE

by Thich Nhat Hanh

I am a World Trade Center tower, standing tall in the clear blue sky, feeling a violent blow in my side, and I am a towering inferno of pain and suffering imploding upon myself and collapsing to the ground. May I rest in peace.
I am a terrified passenger on a hijacked airplane not knowing where we are going or that I am riding on fuel tanks that will be instruments of death, and I am a worker arriving at my office not knowing that in just a moment my future will be obliterated. May I rest in peace.
I am a pigeon in the plaza between the two towers eating crumbs from someone's breakfast when fire rains down on me from the skies, and I am a bed of flowers admired daily by thousands of tourists now buried under five stories of rubble. May I rest in peace.
I am a firefighter sent into dark corridors of smoke and debris on a mission of mercy only to have it collapse around me, and I am a rescue worker risking my life to save lives who is very aware that I may not make it out alive. May I rest in peace.
I am a survivor who has fled down the stairs and out of the building to safety who knows that nothing will ever be the same in my soul again, and I am a doctor in a hospital treating patients burned from head to toe who knows that these horrible images will remain in my mind forever. May I know peace.
I am a tourist in Times Square looking up at the giant TV screens thinking I'm seeing a disaster movie as I watch the Twin Towers crash to the ground, and I am a New York woman sending e-mails to friends and family letting them know that I am safe. May I know peace.
I am a piece of paper that was on someone's desk this morning and now I'm debris scattered by the wind across lower Manhattan, and I am a stone in the graveyard at Trinity Church covered with soot from the buildings that once stood proudly above me, death meeting death. May I rest in peace.
I am a dog sniffing in the rubble for signs of life, doing my best to be of service, and I am a blood donor waiting in line to make a simple but very needed contribution for the victims. May I know peace.
I am a resident in an apartment in downtown New York who has been forced to evacuate my home, and I am a resident in an apartment uptown who has walked 100 blocks home in a stream of other refugees. May I know peace.
I am a family member who has just learned that someone I love has died, and I am a rabbi who must comfort someone who has suffered a heart-breaking loss. May I know peace.
I am a loyal American who feels violated and vows to stand behind any military action it takes to wipe terrorists off the face of the earth, and I am a loyal American who feels violated and worries that people who look and sound like me are all going to be blamed for this tragedy. May I know peace.
I am a frightened city dweller who wonders whether I'll ever feel safe in a skyscraper again, and I am a pilot who wonders whether there will ever be a way to make the skies truly safe. May I know peace.
I am the owner of a small store with five employees that has been put out of business by this tragedy, and I am an executive in a multinational corporation who is concerned about the cost of doing business in a terrorized world. May I know peace.
I am a visitor to New York City who purchases postcards of the World Trade Center Twin Towers that are no more, and I am a television reporter trying to put into words the terrible things I have seen. May I know peace.
I am a boy in New Jersey waiting for a father who will never come home, and I am a boy in a faraway country rejoicing in the streets of my village because someone has hurt the hated Americans. May I know peace.
I am a general talking into the microphones about how we must stop the terrorist cowards who have perpetrated this heinous crime, and I am an intelligence officer trying to discern how such a thing could have happened on American soil, and I am a city official trying to find ways to alleviate the suffering of my people. May I know peace.
I am a terrorist whose hatred for America knows no limit and I am willing to die to prove it, and I am a terrorist sympathizer standing with all the enemies of American capitalism and imperialism, and I am a master strategist for a terrorist group who planned this abomination. My heart is not yet capable of openness, tolerance, and loving. May I know peace.
I am a citizen of the world glued to my television set, fighting back my rage and despair at these horrible events, and I am a person of faith struggling to forgive the unforgivable, praying for the consolation of those who have lost loved ones, calling upon the merciful beneficence of god/ Yahweh/ Allah/ Spirit/ Higher Power. May I know peace.
I am a child of God who believes that we are all children of God and we are all part of each other. May we all know peace.

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Advice on Receiving Consecration
By Peter Meyer

Introduction
In recent years, a number of Tibetan lamas have visited foreign countries and have given numerous
consecration (also known as empowerments, or in the Tibetan language as "Wang"), but many people
who are interested in Vajrayana Buddhism are still unsure of what a Wang is, and of what they are
receiving in a Wang. Also there has been widespread ignorance of the proper procedures to be performed
at Wang and when meeting lamas. Thus these notes of advice were written in order to disseminate
understanding, at least in some small way, of what a Wang is, what happens during a Wang and what
should be done when attending a Wang.
Explanations of Terms
The Tibetan term "lama" refers to any person who, after many years of study and practice of the
Tibetan Buddhist teachings, has acquired philosophical understanding and spiritual realization
and who is respected as a teacher. Thus a Tibetan monk who does not have any special attainments
is not considered to be a lama. Also, a lama need not be a monk. The Vajrayana path is open to all,
and married persons are not barred from receiving or giving (if they are fully qualified to do so)
any of the Tantric teachings. Among the heads lamas of the Sakyapa Order, some (such as the
founder, Sachen Kunga Nyingpo) have married, but some (such as the illustrious Sakya Pandita)
have lived the lives of fully ordained celibate monks.
The Sanskrit term "guru" refers to a person of great spiritual attainment and authority; it was
translated into Tibetan as "lama". Among foreigners, the term "guru" is commonly used to refer
to a personal teacher, either one's own or someone else's. In this case, the term may be translated
as "preceptors", the person who gives you the precepts for correct study and practice. In Vajrayana
Buddhism devotion to the lama who is your guru is most important, and it is necessary for spiritual
attainment. It is taught in Vajrayana Buddhism that the minds of sentient beings are, in their pure
nature, not different from the mind of the Buddha. It is the purpose of Tantric practice to realize
this, and you should seek as your guru a lama who has himself realized this. Having found such a
lama, you should cultivate devotion to him so that you can recognize more clearly the Buddha natures
as it is manifest in him. In this way, you are led to realize the pure nature of your own mind as the
mind of the Buddha also.
About the "Wang" itself
The Tibetan term "Wang" literally means "empowerment". It may also be translated as "consecration"
(in Sanskrit, the word is "abhishekha"). It refers to a ceremony in which a lama, on the basis of his own
spiritual attainments and his understanding of the rituals (this means not only having knowledge of the
rituals themselves but also understanding and following the rules and vows which accompany those rituals),
places a disciple in touch with a particular Tantric Deity and empowers him to recite the mantra and seek
to realize the non-duality between his own mind and the mind of the Deity. Much happens during a "Wang"
and everything that happens has its special meaning and is not just for ceremonial decoration.
A "Wang" always involves several different consecrations. The number and nature of these depends
on the kinds of "Wang". A major "Wang" may have four consecrations some of which themselves are
sub-divided into several consecrations. A minor "Wang" generally has three consecrations, one each
for body, voice and mind. These are the "three doors" through which we act (and thus create karma).
To purify our actions, we must purify each of these three doors. The goal of Tantra is to purify all our
actions of body, voice and mind by removing our afflictions of desire, hatred, ignorance, etc.) and
obstructions (to liberation and omniscience) so that our actions become not different from those of a
Buddha.
Receiving a "Wang" is like the planting of a seed; later, with the right conditions, this seed will sprout
and grow into Buddhahood. During the "Wang", each of these three doors is blessed individually,
and thus there is a Body Consecration, a Voice Consecration and a Mind Consecration. In this way, the
defilements of each of the three doors are separately purified, and you are empowered to meditate, during
subsequent meditative practice, on them as being those of the Deity (ie. to visualize oneself in the form of
the Deity, to recite the Deity's mantra and to meditate on the non-duality of your own mind and the mind
of the Deity).
What to do in the "Wang"
You should prepare yourself for a "Wang" as if you were going to receive consecration from the
Buddha Himself - as, in a sense, you are. During the preparation ritual performed by the lama before
the "Wang", he has created himself as the Deity, throughout the "Wang", you should think of the
lama as not different from the Deity, and visualize him in the form of the Deity. For example, if you
are receiving a Manjushri Wang, then you should constantly imagine the lama in the form of Manjushri,
and believe that it is Manjushri Himself who is conferring the empowerment is most effective if you
cultivate a firm belief that you are receiving the "Wang" from the Deity Himself.
Before entering the area where the "Wang" is to be given, you should remove your shoes and wash
your mouth with water. Upon entering the presence of the lama, you should make three prostrations
towards him, and then take your seat on the floor. If, when sitting crossed-legged, your legs or back
begin to ache, then change position unobstrustively. You should not lie on the floor or sit with your
legs stretched out towards the lama or shrine. All this holds not just for "Wang", but for any occasion
when you enter the presence of a lama and remain there for a teaching, a private audience or a "Wang".
While waiting for the "Wang" to begin, instead of looing around at everyone else or talking with them,
you should quietly reflect on your reason for being there. At the beginning of all Wang and meditation
sessions, it is important to cultivate the right attitude, which is as follows:
Sentient beings suffer under the conditions of dissatisfaction and sorrow caused by the afflictions of
desire, hatred and ignorance. Although you may recognize this condition of universal suffering, you
cannot do much about it because you are also bound by the afflictions. Only by attaining the wisdom,
compassion and power of the Buddhas can you rescue yourself and others from this condition. So, in
order to gain the state of Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings (who are no different from
yourself), you are entering the path to full enlightenment by receiving this consecration.
A "Wang" always has three parts: the preparation, the main part and the conclusion. In the preparation,
you first perform the mandala offering to the guru, whom you visualize in the form of the deity surrounded
by Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The mandala offering beings when the monk who is assisting the lama
makes three prostrations towards him and begins to heap rice upon a silver mandala plate. (He is making
the offering on behalf of all those present). You should imagine that, in offering this rice, you are really
offering the whole universe with millions of worlds containing all good things. You are offering this to the
lama to request him to bestow the empowerment upon you. This empowerment is worth more that anything
material which you could offer, so even if you gave the whole universe (as you are doing symbolically), this
would still not be enough in return for what the lama is giving you. When the monk assisting the lama
concludes the chanting of the mandala offering verses, he will throw some rice in the air. At this point,
you should also throw some rice in the air (forward) with a movement of the hand beginning at the heart
- these offerings are from your heart.
During the preparation, you have to recite certain prayers, such as the seven-fold prayer. The lama will
recite these in Tibetan and you should repeat them after him as best as you can. This has two forms: the
Tantric Seven-fold Prayer and the Mahayana Seven-fold Prayer. In its Tantric form, the Seven-fold Prayer
has the following parts: firstly, you confess all the sinful and deluded actions which you have performed
during your countless past lives. Secondly, you rejoice in all the virtuous deeds performed by the Buddhas
and Bodhisattvas and by all sentient beings. Thirdly, you promise to hold the Absolute Bodhicitta which
is the realization of the Ultimate Truth. Fourthly, you take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha
from this time forth until you attain Enlightenment. Fifthly, and sixthly, you promise to hold the relative
Bodhicitta which is:
a. the desire to attain Enlightenment for the sake of rescuing all sentient beings from their sufferings
(the Wishing Bodhicitta) and;
b. the resolve to take all steps necessary for attaining Enlightenment for this purpose (the Entering
Bodhicitta). Finally, you dedicate the merit produced by all these good actions for the welfare of all
sentient beings.
Throughout the "Wang", there are various visualizations you must perform. These are normally
explained by the lama at the appropriate time. The visualizations during the main part of the "Wang"
are more complicated than those of the preparation. The main part of the "Wang" consists of the
Body, Voice and Mind Consecrations as described before. Usually, at the beginning of each of these,
you visualize light issuing from the lama's heart and shining upon yourself and all other sentient
beings, purifying them all of defilements. During the Body Consecration, you visualize yourself
in the form of the Deity, according to the instructions of the lama. This Body Consecration is made
firm in you when incense is wafted about by the monk assisting the lama. During the Voice Consecration,
you usually have to visualize the mantra of the Deity (in Tibetan letters) emerging from the heart of
the lama and entering your own heart. The lama then recites the mantra which you repeat after him
a certain number of times. During the Mind Consecration, you visualize the seed-syllable of the Deity
in your heart (this is a radiant Tibetan letter standing on a sun-disc or a moon-disc) and by concentrating
on this seed-syllable, (which is the essence of the Deity's mind) you try to realize the non-duality of
your own mind and that of the lama and the Deity. In Tantric meditation, visualization is important.
It is one of the main tools employed in the transformation of one's ordinary deluded self into Buddha.
The main import of this is to transform our usual modes of conceptual thinking into those of an
enlightened one.
The "Wang" is concluded by various prayers and a final mandala offering of thanks to the lama for
bestowing the empowerment. It may then be necessary to file past the lama to receive any special
blessing, such as the placing of the vajra, flask, etc., on top of the head. At this point, it is appropriate
to make offerings to the lama. If the mandala of the Deity has been constructed, then you should look
into it and offer homage to the Deity at its center.
Traditionally, in Tibetan, a lama would give a "Wang" only when requested to; the person requesting
the "Wang" would certainly offer a substantial gift (gold, horses, new copies of the Tibetan canon, etc.)
and everyone attending the "Wang" would also make offerings to the lama. If you understand what
you have received during the "Wang", then you will feel a natural inclination to make vast offerings
to the lama out of a recognition of this great kindness. Each person should offer what he can and what
he feels appropriate. After the "Wang", you should retire from the area to allow the lama to perform
the concluding rituals without distraction.
The meditation practice (sadhana) should be done regularly (preferably everyone) in a quiet place before
an altar or an image of the Buddha. In your daily life, cultivate an awareness of the sufferings of others,
search out your own delusion, and place your trust in the Buddhas.

This work, entitled "Advice on Receiving Consecration" is an adaption from the short text, "On Receiving
Wang" which was written in December, 1977 at the Jetsun Sakya Center, New York, by His Holiness
Sakya Trizin's disciple, Peter Meyer. By the merit of this work, may all sentient beings leave the sufferings
of worldly existence through the path leading to Buddhahood.

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Space is Information

Many Westerners have difficulties accepting prophecies - including Tibetan ones since they can often be interpreted in different ways. Westerners experience the predictions called "Mos" as being quite accurate and relevant. However, in the last year the field of prophecy has attained another tangible dimension.
The reappearance of a 350 year old historical thanka may be the strongest validating confirmation which helps prove that Thaye Dorje in Delhi is the true Karmapa. Hannah and I have known about this thanka since May 1996 when we talked with Kunzig Shamar Rinpoche. Recently, more details along with pictures of the thanka have come into our hands. Without these, I would never have talked about this subject. Openness and truth have until now always been our best friends, and the Karmapa perfectly proves himself without miracles.
Here are the facts as I know them. In May last year Kunzig Shamarpa and Khenpo Chodrak visited the monastery of the Chinese Lopon Rinpoche in Taiwan. The monks there showed them a thanka which had been rescued from Tibet and taken to Nepal six months earlier. The thanka depicts a Karmapa in the center and below him a Shamarpa wearing unusual robes, clearly recognizable by his red crown. The visiting Rinpoches were enthusiastic about the beauty of the work. After Shamarpa had finished viewing the piece, Khenpo stayed behind and suddenly recognized the thanka as being one of the prophetic thankas of the 10th Karmapa. These thankas were painted by the 10th Karmapa while he was in exile during the period when the Mongolian soldiers supporting the 5th Dalai Lama were busy destroying the monasteries of the older non-Gelugpa lineages. It was during this time that Gyaltsab obtained his title "Goshir" by joining the Mongolians.
As Khenpo Chodrak looked more closely he noticed that Karmapa Thaye Dorje's name was written beside the throne (as seen on the enlargement). He quickly called Shamarpa who was extremely surprised and happy. A scientific examination of the thanka by a team of experts has been requested in Taiwan in order that the same type of scandal brought about from Situpa's forged letter does not happen again with the thanka.
As soon as the results of the examination have been released we will inform all of Karmapa's centers. When I asked Kunzig Shamarpa about the thanka, it was his opinion that the 10th Karmapa foresaw the present controversy and because of this, deliberately wrote the name of the 17th Karmapa on the thanka in big golden letters.
Now, you all know what I know. It will be exiting if this story is confirmed through the scientific laboratory tests.
All the best,
Lama Ole Nydahl

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Ocean Of Sound
By Beatrice Newbery

Tibetan Buddhism has cultivated a liturgy of extraordinary power and originality.
It encompasses both vocal and instrumental music and is distinguished from Tibetan
popular music in terms of its conception, style and function. Solo singing does not exist
in this realm, in fact a multitude of voices, chanting in unison, is the distinguishing
characteristic of Tibetan sacred music. The music is an extremely complex, multi-
dimensional phenomenon, whose repertoire contains hundreds of protean musical
forms which frequently merge. The foundational concepts of this musical type
are so radical that Western terminology is often ill-equipped to convey them.
The origins of Tibetan ritual music are obscure but there is a strong belief that the
religious music originated from teachings of the Dakinis. During the third Dalai Lama's
time (1543-1588), a lama called Takpo Dorjechang had a clear vision of the Dakinis in
wgucg they taught him the most complex and beautiful music; the Yang (dbyangs). He
taught others and the tradition began to develop. Others have traced Tibetan sacred
music back to the Buddha's lifetime. On the Buddha's death, 500 Arhats gathered to
chant the Buddha's teachings, following which choral chanting became a medium for
transmitting and protecting the Buddhist teachings. From this developed a chant style
called Sarasvati, 'auspicious intonation', of which Yang is said to be the Tibetan
descendant.
The words 'ritual music' pin point with most accuracy the music of Tibetan Buddhism,
since sacred music only exists withtin the ritual context. It is ritualised both in the sense
that it conforms to a regular calendrical performance schedule and that it invariably
accompanies a rite. As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpochey explains, 'The music of these rituals
is not meant by itself to have great effects. It is merely an accompaniment to the general
psychological process of the rite'.
Withtin this ritual context, the main function of music is an offering to the deities. As
Terry Ellingson points out, 'music is particularly effective as an offering because it is
by definition aurally beauitful'. This idea was clarified by the words of Thupten Jigme
from Nechung Monastery in Dharamsala who said 'music has the power to attract. If
you say the words of a song your audience won't come, if you sing the words loudly and
clearly then your audience will be bigger and come rushing'. This reminds us that it is not
the music alone which pleases or invities, the words of the text are crucial. Music makes
the words palatable to a celestial audience and to its earthly performers. The use of the
word 'Ta' (rta), meaning horse, in connection with sacred music, (for example, the name
of recitation chants is don-ta,) shows how the music is conceived as 'carrying' the words
to its audience.
For the monks, melodies are an aid to the memorization of the texts. Upon entering a
monastery, the first task for a novie is to memorize, by listening and repetition, the entire
central repertoire of chants. Every monk is required to attain a level of competence in
performing vocal music, (in fact if a monk at the upper Tantric college fails to achieve
a level of proficiency in their special 'dzo' voice, he is expelled from the monastery). All
monks must take part in chanting since both their education and ritual knowledge depend
upon their attendance. Chanting is, in many ways, a basic prerequisite educational system.
The music also slows the words down so that the monk has time to contemplate their
meaning. Recitation does not always take a melodic form, music is only employed in
passages of textual gravity, that is when the mind must be applied with extra force. Its
function is to aid meditation. 'Ritual, as known to the lamas, has assumed multiple
meanings. As a preliminary to meditative practice by an initiate, it serves to heighten
his consciousness. Musical sounds, canonically ordered, affect a man's psychic condition
in such a way as much to render him more receptive to the truth' (Lhalungpa, 1969).
The practice of 'Sadhana', the Sanskrit word for 'self-generation', is closely connected
with ritual, in fact 'every ritual involves self-generation because every ritual involves
deities' (Thupten Jigme). Each monk must meditate on and visualize his personal deity
and practise the emulation of the deity, since in Tibetan Buddhism, deities represent
only specific states of being withtun each individual practitioner. Ngawang Tashi, the
ex-Master of Chants at Namgyal Monastery explained that 'Meditation does not
necessarily mean keep quiet. Whenever you sing well and the wisdom beings are happy,
that brings you closer to them; it will prevent bad health and misfortune and encourage
success. It also helps you to achieve understanding and accumulate merit'.
For Mahayana practice, the essence of which lies in compassion for the suffering
beings, the performance of sacred music is for the benefit of both celestial and human
perception. Music is thought to produce happiness and so it is not merely an offering
to the 'Three Jewels', but is thought to nourish the wellbeing of this world's inhabitants
as well. This means that a chanting monk can gain merit due to the enjoyment of his
lay listeners, and sacred music is not simply communication restricted to monks and
deities.
Whatever the human reponse to Tibetan sacred music, the fabric of the music in its
entirety is not for our evaluation. Atisha (958-1054) separated sacred music into 'actually
present' and 'mentally produced' music. While the monks are chanting or playing their
instruments, they are expected to simultaneously produce music in their minds for the
embellishment of the sacred piece. There is a story which is said to show that the deities
can hear music whether it is audible or not. As the seventh Dalai Lama (1708-1757) once
walked around the roof of the Potala, he saw Choedewala, a deity who is chief of the
retinue of Mahakala, dancing in the sky in a state of rapture. The Dalai Lama sent one
of his servants to find out what was happening down below. The servant discovered a
solitary, former monk of one of the Tantric colleges, who explained that in his monastery,
this was the time of day for playing sacred music and today he was banging two stones
together and nostalgically imagining the music. Choedewala appeared to be dancing to
the music in his mind. As Terry Ellingson explains, 'The inclusion in the concept of ritual
of music that is mentally produced but not physically present, implies that from a
performers perspective, the whole of the music offered in a given performance is always
more than the sum of its audible parts'. This mental output completes the common triad
of body, speech and mind, the body being represented by the body or instruments, and
speech by the sounds they produce.
The most common type of ritual observance in Tibetan monasteries is the regular
assembly. These vary, but the emphasis is on the general practice of Buddhism
according to a specific religious tradition and the texts performed are called 'Practice
of Religion'. The musical accompaniment in these assemblies ranges from spoken
recitations to a mixture of musical types. Nevertheless, the comprehensive nature of
the ceremony does not lead itself to the more involved musical developments found in
specialised rituals.
Each sect, indeed each monastery, has its own specialised rituals and repertoire of
ritual music. The central repertoire will contain a cross-section of the main types of
deities represented in the tantric practice and will comprise a selection of regularly
performed rituals. Monasteries and colleges with an emphasis on 'ritual' activities and
the invocation of deities, make use of complex and difficult musical genres, such as
Yang, ritual dances, and instrumental and vocal accompaniment. In each monastery,
music is categorised in terms of the deity or type of deity it addresses. All offerings,
including music, must be suited to and express the nature of the deity who is the object.
These deities are often divided into 'spiritual masters' (bLa ma), personal meditational
deities, the focus of the teachings and practice of particular tantras (Yidam), Dakinis
(mkha' 'groskyong). Generally speaking the music offered to the latter is regarded as
wrathful (drag po) and that offered to the personal, meditational deities as peaceful
(zhi ba). At Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, rituals of the personal deities such as
Yamataka, Guhyasamaja, and Heruka contain music which is produced softly. It is not
that the tune itself is more or less powerful, it depends on the method of production. So
the style is slow and deliberate, the textual changes smooth amd the emphasis is on such
instruments as the big cymbals (sil snyan), drums and conch trumpets. The fierce Dharma
Protectors like Chogyal demand stronger voices, roughly delivered, and loudly played
instruments such as small cymbals (sbub'chal), human bone drums and trumpets. The
music reserved for their benefit is called 'great' yang (dbyangs che).
The function of the ritual may also dictate the music type. There are not only
the rituals of offering, but those inviting the deity to enter the temple, those of
propitiation and healing, and those of benediction, and the music must be appropriate
for the intended outcome of the ceremony. For example, at Nechung Monastery,
in Dharamsala, the monks occasionally perform a fierce ritual to dispel or destroy
spirits which involves the throwing of a ritual cake. 'In this the music has to be more
strong and continuous and whoever hears it should be terrified' declared the Chant
Master. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpochey also emphasises that 'music provides power,
particularly in sections where wrathful deities are invoked or evil spirits are exorcized'.
There is an alternative system of classification which involves the method of voicing
the words and that method of voicing the words and that is the division of sacred music
into Don ('don), Ta (rta) and Yang. Don, or 'recitative chants' refers to the chanting and
recitation of texts. It is a form of stylised recitation, following a simple pattern, which
in its most elemental form resembles a regulated strand of ordinary speech. Many
Tibetans would not include this type of chanting withtin the realms of music at all. Ta
refers to 'melodic chants', with distinct, consciously patterned 'melodies' which are,
unlike Don, independent of the text. Although relatively musical, the manner in which
Ta are vocalised is 'spoken'. Finally, Yang are 'tone-contour chants'. These are the most
highly rated, most involved and most beautiful chants and melodies used in Tibetan ritual
music. It is impossible to convey the subtle movement and delicacy of Yang, yet we can
say that, unlike Don and Ta, it is 'intoned' rather than spoken, and that it is made up of
smoothly effected rises and falls in intonation, which constantly alter with remarkable
fluidity. The volume of the sound swells and ebbs and the piece moves at an amazingly
slow pace and deep pitch. These extremely low tones are only relative to each other so
that a Yang melody may 'ascend' to a higher pitch, or 'descend' to a lower. Although to
Western ears the music may seem extremely lethargic, a hastily performed Yang would
lose the details of the subtly changing pitch and vocal quality. For Tibetans, a Yang is
the only 'pure' tone-contour melody. It is, both conceptually and aurally, the most
extraordinary and complex kind of music, and is considered to be the cream of the
Tibetan Buddhist musical repertoire.
The Yang is the only vocalisation that is preserved on paper; a unique form of notation
called a Yang-Yig (dhyangs-yig) serves as a mnemonic aid, a reminder to the Master of
Chants. Different notational systems belong to different traditions and monasteries.
Nonetheless, in each case it is a matter of suggesting by complex curved lines the
movements which must be curved lines the movements which must be effected by the
voice and the modifications which exist even withtin the utterance of one syllable. In
some Yang-yig, extended annotations characterise the melody by stating that it should
run like a flowing river, or that it should be light like bird song. More important is the
discovery withtin these notations of certain 'meaningless' syllables. It is said that these
extra sounds are for the deliberate obscuration of textual meaning to the uninitiated.
Some of them are tantric words which have a deep religious meaning that only the highly
realised can understand. These extra sounds also enable the text to fit the lingering
Yang melody, meanwhile giving the monks time to contemplate each important word as
it comes.
There are several types of voice used in Tibetan ritual music and each is designated
according to its place of origin in the body. Thus, there is the 'body-cavity' voice (khog
pa i skad), the 'throat' voice (mgrin skad), the 'nose' voice (sna skad) and so on. There
is in addition 'male' (pho) voice, 'female' (mo) voice, and 'neuter' (ma ring) voice.
However, the most interesting divisions are in terms of the way the voice is produced.
'Own' voice (rang skad) is the normal method of voice production which is practised, for
example, in the Gelug and Nyingma sects. The chanting fluctuates around one bass-note
in continually recurring variations of a theme, a litany, comprising no more than three or
four notes. 'Tantric voice' (rgyud skad) is practised at the Tantric colleges. There are two
types of Tantric voice, 'the voice of the hybrid yak-bull' (mdzo skad) which is practised
at the Upper Tantric College, and 'the voice of the (slayer of the) Lord of Death' (gshin
rje'i ngar skad), practised at the Lower Tantric College. These ar the vocal styles most
peculiar to Tibet and they are often dubbed the Yang style.
The method of singing requires a completely relaxed body, free-breathing and a
meditative state of mind. The rumbling bass notes sound from the totally relaxed
vocal chords which have been allowed to resonate at the octave below the note as
normally sung. After many hours of practice the deep note suddenly 'interrupts'. It is
a roaring, throaty noise underneath the note being sung by the vocal chords, an
undernote or sub-resonance which shakes the entire body of the performer.
It is believed that a good voice is the result of one's karma as Ngawang Tashi
illustrated with the following story. Long ago, a labourer was employed in the
construction of Boudhnath stupa. His incredulity at the sheer size of the task he
faced led him to abuse his employers and ridicule the idea of building such a
monument. Yet when the stupa was completed, its magnificence made him repentant
and to display his regret, he placed a bell on the monument. In his next life he became
a monk. He had two striking characteristics: one was his hideous physical appearance
and the other his beautiful voice, each the result of his bad and good deeds. Monks
are not prohibited from adopting ways to improve the voice, however, and sometimes
these are quite extraordinary.
Vocal and instrumental music are distinguished in an unusual way in Tibetan
Buddhism. Vocal music is classed as music that is 'conjoined' with its motivating
thought in the performers body, while instrumental music is categorised as
'unconjoined', music produced by external conditions, for example, wind.
Although every ritual is accompanied by 'mentally produced' instrumental music,
whether it is joined by audible instrumental music depends on the exigencies of the
ritual text and tradition. Rol mo (the term designating instrumental music) however,
is treated as independent musical composition in its own right in the overall ritual
context, with its own unique characteristics. The most notable of these is the line of
development that the music takes. Western music and Tibetan folk music both follow
thematically circular patterns, that is, they always come back to the beginning. So, for
example, a classical piece may go from A to B to C and then back to A again, or at the
most basic level, we have a chorus followed by a verse and then the chorus repeated.
The development of Tibetan sacred music is, on the contrary, linear, that is, it goes
from A to Z through a variety of constantly altering themes and rhythms. In this sense,
sacred music can be contrasted to the most prominent manifestation of Buddhist
cyclic concepts, the wheel of life which depicts the cyclic nature of existence. Sacred
music deliberately adopts a linear form to remind us of our ability to achieve liberation
from this wheel of life. It represents both the Buddhist goal and the path that leads there.
As the Master of Chants at Namgyal monastery explained, 'Sincere Buddhist
practitioners are attempting to follow this path from A to Z. The musical connotations
help us to think about the line we must try to follow'. In this sense, the performance of
sacred music mirrors the greatest achievement in Buddhist spiritual endeavour.
Altogether there are as many as thirteen instruments (some in pairs) that can be
played at any one time and these are divided into four categories. The 'beaten'
instruments outline the basic compositional structure, the 'rung' instruemtns enrich
the ensemble sound texture, the 'blown' instruments play melodies and the 'stringed'
instruments inaudibly augment the piece. Their sounds are either 'mentally produced'
or the instruments themselves are offered but not played. The entire orchestra consists
of one damaru (a double headed hand drum), one drum and two sets of cymbals in the
first group, one hand bell in the second, and two reed instruments (rgya gling), two
short trumpets (rkang gling), two long trumpets (dung chen) and two conches in the
third.

The basic meaning of the term 'Rol mo' is 'cymbals' and in ritual instrumental ensemble
music these are the basic requirement. Only cymbals and drums are used to accompany
chants, although bells are used to herald crucial moments in the development of the ritual,
sometimes providing a counter-rhythmic element as well. The cymbals are played in a
peculiar rotating movement which makes use of their natural energy or 'rebound' while
the drums are beaten with long curved sticks. Together they lead the ensemble and forge
the outline of the piece. The basic structure of instrumental music is this rhythmic
outline and the other instruments, however, prominent, remain withtin the framework
created by the beaten instruments. It is only after a section has been completed that the
wind instruments join the percussion and play the next section.
The rhythm that the percussion instruments effect does not fit the Western concept of
evenly measured units of time. Instead, it is contingent on events withtin the ritual, or is
dictated by the importance of dwelling on certain passages of the text and bringing out
every detail in the performance. Consequently there is no symbol for 'rest' in Tibetan
beat notation. Rhythmic units are constantly changing duration so that the slow and
seemingly regular pace of a gliding scale may accelerate to such a speed that rhythm is
no longer recognisable. The rejection of a rhythm which divides time into equal units
establishes Rol mo as a wholly unique musical type.
The long horns, sometimes up to fifteen feet long, are often regarded as the principal
melodic instruments. Once again, thisis not melody in the Western sense, but the
tone-contour Yang that they play, using a pitch range which covers three octaves. They
create, 'sounds that seem to come from the womb of the earth and from the depth of
space'. The vibrations are so heavy that they have been known to loosen the performer's
teeth and even cause them to fall out. It is also recorded that when the Tibetans first
heard their deep sound they ran away shouting 'War had come!' The reed instruments
and the short trumpets, which were formerly fashioned from human thigh bones, are
more recognizably tuneful than the horns but they are played less in rituals.
Each instrument is broadly associated with different states of mind. The reed
instruments, the horn and the large cynbals are dedicated to the peaceful deities,
the short trumpets and the shriller cymbals correspond to the fearful deities and
the long horns and the drums may be assigned to either kind. Some of the
instruments have more particular functions or association. The reed instruments,
for example, have the special function of summoning and bidding farewell to the
deities, often from the roof of the monastery. The sound of the conch represents
the voice of the Dharma and is therefore used at times of death, so that the deceased
can carry that voice to his or her next life. The handbell cannot even be touched by
the uninitiated, and is played only by the Abbot. It has such a complex network
of tantric associations that the Master of Chants at Namgyal declined to explained.
The Abbot also plays the similarly potent damaru which was originally made from the
halves of two human skulls, joined at the crown and covered with skin. It is twirled so
that the two pellets on strings strike the skins alternately. It is considered to give
special pleasure to the fierce deities and adds a strange beauty to music in that style.
These two bone instruments were made in this way as a reminder of the impermanence
of all things.

Both instrumental and vocal music reach a climax during the 'invitation' section of a
ritual, the moment when the deities are called upon to occupy the space in front of the
performers. This is when the music must be at its most compelling and beautiful so it is
likely that if a Yang exists withtin the ritual, it will take the form of an invitation. Likewise
if instrumental music is used, one of the longest and most intricate pieces is sure to be
an 'Instrumental invitation'.
Although in some monasteries all monks are required to play instruments, usually only
those with obvious musical talent will undertake advanced training. Before settling on any
one instrument, a monk must learn to play each one in the standard order, starting with
the drum, proceeding to the conch trumpet, and so on. The most specialised training is
required for the reed instruments and long horns since both require knowledge of the art
of circular breathing. Players of both instruments receive special training when may last
for a number of years before they perform. The cymbals however, require the most
advanced skills. Since they lead, a good acquaintance with the vocal parts and the ritual
structure is needed. The cymbals are thus the special responsibility of the Chant Master.
Training of all the instruments is conducted on an apprenticeship basis, although all
instrumentalists are ultimately answerable to the Chant Master. Despite the quite
extraordinary form of notation for the instruments, as with vocal music, familiarity is
gained through listening and repetition. During the performances the players are under
constant surveillance and examination is conducted in this manner.
At the hub of the monastic musical group is the Master of Chants (dbU mdzad). He is
the leader of performances and the musical director (sometimes in charge of the monastic
ritual as well). He achieves his position by rising thourhg the ranks of the monastery's
musical performancers due to his musical ability, knowledge of the ritual repertoire,
popularity and leadership qualities. In the hierarchical divisions of monastic leadership,
the Chant Master usually ranks second below the Head Lama and his post may combine
administrative and musical responsibilities. Even the most ordinary Chant Master must
have a sound knowledge of the rituals, their intended effects, structures and functions. In
the bigger monasteries there are extremely complex hierarchies of vocal and instrumental
musicians at the peak of which sits the Chant Master, unifying the two musical traditions.
In Namgyal Monastery alone, the central repertoire consists of 30 to 40 Yang. As the
Chant Master pointed out, there are again 30 to 40 different ways of playing these for
each deity. Before the Chinese occupation of Tibet, there were at least 6000 religious
institutions in the Land of Snow and since each monastery has its own unique collection
of Yang, the total number of these sacred musical pieces must have been vast. Unlike
religious texts, there are no wood blocks for the printing of musical notation and all of
the original Yang-yig were hand-written on paper. Most of these fragile texts have
been destroyed which was a blow for sacred music. Although some Yang-yig have been
rewritten from memory and monasteries urge people to retrieve even the shortest line
of notation if it is found, nearly half of Tibet's Yang-Yig have been burnt and are lost
from memory.
Nevertheless, in the exiled community Tibetan sacred music can be heard resounding
through the halls of each monastery and the sepulchral vibrations of the long horns echo
across fields and foot hills. Ritual music remains an extremely active tradition, and every
monastery is a hive of musical activity. Monks travel abroad regularly, performing their
ritual music, and for the first time, outsiders are exposed to a world of considerably
altered musical dimensions.

Thanks to Ven.Ngawang Tashi and Ven.Thubten Choephel of Namgyal Monastery
and Ven.Thubten Jigme of Nechung Monastery.
(Original article taken from "Cho-Yang - The Voice of Tibetan Religion & Culture"
Issue No.5, an occasional publication of the Department of Religion & Culture,
Central Tibetan Administration of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.)

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Resting Completely
By Pema Chödrön

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves as we are that meditation becomes a transformative process. The pith instruction is, Stay. . . stay. . . just stay.
As a species, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort. To be encouraged to stay with our vulnerability is news that we definitely can use. Sitting meditation is our support for learning how to do this. Sitting meditation, also known as mindfulness-awareness practice, is the foundation of bodhichitta training. It is the home ground of the warrior bodhisattva.
Sitting meditation cultivates loving-kindness and compassion, the relative qualities of bodhichitta, which could be defined as completely awakened heart and mind. It gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies. It is a method of cultivating unconditional friendliness toward ourselves and for parting the curtain of indifference that distances us from the suffering of others. It is our vehicle for learning to be a truly loving person.
Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.
This coming back to the immediacy of our experience is training in unconditional bodhichitta. By simply staying here, we relax more and more into the open dimension of our being. It feels like stepping out of a fantasy and relaxing with the truth.
Yet there is no guarantee that sitting meditation will be of benefit. We can practice for years without it penetrating our hearts and minds. We can use meditation to reinforce our false beliefs: it will protect us from discomfort; it will fix us; it will fulfill our hopes and remove our fears. This happens because we don't properly understand why we are practicing.
Why do we meditate? This is a question we'd be wise to ask. Why would we even bother to spend time alone with ourselves?
First of all, it is helpful to understand that meditation is not just about feeling good. To think that this is why we meditate is to set ourselves up for failure. We'll assume we are doing it wrong almost every time we sit down: even the most settled meditator experiences psychological and physical pain. Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, a simple, direct relationship with our being.
Trying to fix ourselves is not helpful. It implies struggle and self-denigration. Denigrating ourselves is probably the major way that we cover over bodhichitta.
Does not trying to change mean we have to remain angry and addicted until the day we die? This is a reasonable question. Trying to change ourselves doesn't work in the long run because we're resisting our own energy. Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion. We are, as the eighth-century Buddhist master Shantideva pointed out, very much like a blind person who finds a jewel buried in a heap of garbage. It is right here in our smelliest of stuff that we discover the awakened heart of basic clarity and goodness, the completely open mind of bodhichitta.
It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves as we are that meditation becomes a transformative process. When we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, we finally let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri, renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.
There are four main qualities that are cultivated when we meditate: steadfastness, clear seeing, experiencing one's emotional distress, and attention to the present moment. These four factors apply not only to sitting meditation, but are essential to all the bodhichitta practices and for relating with difficult situations in our daily lives.
Steadfastness
When we practice meditation we are strengthening our ability to be steadfast with ourselves. No matter what comes up-aching bones, boredom, falling asleep, or the wildest thoughts and emotions-we develop a loyalty to our experience. Although plenty of meditators consider it, we don't run screaming out of the room. Instead we acknowledge that impulse as thinking, without labeling it right or wrong. This no small task. Never underestimate our inclination to bolt when we hurt.
We're encouraged to meditate everyday, even for a short time, in order to cultivate this steadfastness with ourselves. We sit under all kinds of circumstances-whether we are feeling healthy or sick, whether we're in a good mood or depressed, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. As we continue to sit we see that meditation isn't about getting it right or attaining some ideal state. It's about being able to stay present with ourselves. It becomes increasingly clear that we won't be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.
One aspect of steadfastness is simply being in your body. Because meditation emphasizes working with your mind, it's easy to forget that you even have a body.
When you sit down it's important to relax into your body and to get in touch with what is going on. Starting with the top of your head, you can spend a few minutes bringing awareness to every part of your body. When you come to places that are hurting or tense you can breath in and out three or four times, keeping your awareness on that area. When you get to the soles of your feet you can stop or, if you feel like it, you can repeat this body sweep by going from bottom to top. Then at any time during your meditation period, you can quickly tune back into the overall sense of being in your body. For a moment you can bring your awareness directly back to being right here. You are sitting. There are sounds, smells, sights, aches; you are breathing in and out. You can reconnect with your body like this when it occurs to you-maybe once or twice during a sitting session. Then return to the technique.
In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it's impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but also about what it is to be human. All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans. We really don't want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. There are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down.
The pith instruction is, Stay. . . stay. . . just stay. Learning to stay with ourselves in meditation is like training a dog. If we train a dog by beating it, we'll end up with an obedient but very inflexible and rather terrified dog. The dog may obey when we say, "Stay!" "Come!" "Roll over!" and "Sit up!" but he will also be neurotic and confused. By contrast, training with kindness results in someone who is flexible and confident, who doesn't become upset when situations are unpredictable and insecure.
So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What's for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can't stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.
Clear seeing
After we've been meditating for a while, it's common to feel that we are regressing rather then waking up. "Until I started meditating, I was quite settled; now it feels like I'm always restless." "I never used to feel anger; now it comes up all the time." We might complain that meditation is ruining our life, but in fact such experiences are a sign that we're starting to see more clearly. Through the process of practicing the technique day in and out, year after year, we begin to be very honest with ourselves. Clear seeing is another way of saying that we have less self-deception.
The Beat poet Jack Kerouac, feeling primed for a spiritual breakthrough, wrote to a friend before he retreated into the wilderness, "If I don't get a vision on Desolation Peak, then my name ain't William Blake." But later he wrote that he found it hard to face the naked truth. "I'd thought, in June when I get to the top-and everybody leaves-I will come face to face with God or Tathagata (Buddha) and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering-but instead I'd come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it, but face to face with ole Hateful . . . Me."
Meditation requires patience and maitri. If this process of clear seeing isn't based on self-compassion it will become a process of self-aggression. We need self-compassion to stabilize our minds. We need it to work with our emotions. We need it in order to stay.
When we learn to meditate, we are instructed to sit in a certain position on a cushion or chair. We're instructed to just be in the present moment, aware of our breath as it goes out. We're instructed that when our mind has wandered off, without any harshness or judgmental quality, we should acknowledge that as 'thinking" and return to the outbreath. We train in coming back to this moment of being here. In the process of doing this, our fogginess, our bewilderment, our ignorance begin to transform into clear seeing. "Thinking" becomes a code word for seeing "just what is"-both our clarity and our confusion. We are not trying to get rid of thoughts. Rather we are clearly seeing our defense mechanisms, our negative beliefs about ourselves, our desires and our expectations. We also see our kindness, our bravery, our wisdom.
Through the process of practicing the mindfulness-awareness technique on a regular basis, we can no longer hide from ourselves. We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we've erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation is important for a warrior. It marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.
Experiencing our Emotional Distress
Many people, including long-time practitioners, use meditation as a means of escaping difficult emotions. It is possible to misuse the label "thinking" as a way of pushing negativity away. No matter how many times we've been instructed to stay open to whatever arises, we still can use meditation as repression. Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.
Trungpa Rinpoche describes emotion as a combination of self-existing energy and thoughts. Emotion can't proliferate without our internal conversations. If we're angry when we sit to meditate, we are instructed to label the thoughts "thinking" and let them go. Yet below the thoughts something remains-a vital, pulsating energy. There is nothing wrong, nothing harmful about that underlying energy. Our practice is to stay with it, to experience it, to leave it as it is, without proliferating.
There are certain advanced techniques in which you intentionally churn up emotions by thinking of people or situations that make you angry or lustful or afraid. The practice is to let the thoughts go and connect directly with the energy, asking yourself, "Who am I without these thoughts?" What we do with mindfulness-awareness practice is simpler than that, but I consider it equally daring. When emotional distress arises uninvited, we let the story line go and abide with the energy of that moment. This is a felt experience, not a verbal commentary on what is happening. We can feel the energy in our bodies. If we can stay with it, neither acting it out nor repressing it, it wakes us up. People often say, "I fall asleep all the time in meditation. What shall I do?" There are lots of antidotes to drowsiness but my favorite is, "Get angry!"
Not abiding with our energy is a predictable human habit. Acting out and repressing are tactics we use to get away from our emotional pain. For instance most of us when we're angry scream or act it out. We alternate expressions of rage with feeling ashamed of ourselves and wallowing in it. We become so stuck in repetitive behavior that we become experts at getting all worked up. In this way we continue to strengthen our conflicting emotions.
One night years ago I came upon my boyfriend passionately embracing another woman. We were in the house of a millionaire who had a priceless collection of pottery. I was furious and looking for something to throw. Everything I picked up I had to put back down because it was worth at least $10,000. I was completely enraged and I couldn't find an outlet! There were no exits from experiencing my own energy. The absurdity of the situation totally cut through my rage. I went outside and looked at the sky and laughed until I cried.
In vajrayana Buddhism it is said that wisdom is inherent in emotions. When we struggle against our own energy we are rejecting the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than mirrorlike wisdom. Pride and envy without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it's free of grasping is discriminating awareness wisdom.
In bodhichitta training we also welcome the living energy of emotions. When our emotions intensify what we usually feel is fear. This fear is always lurking in our lives. In sitting meditation we practice dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves and leaning into the emotions and the fear. Thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress.
Attention to the Present Moment
Another factor we cultivate in the transformative process of meditation is attention to this very moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love.
Coming back to the present moment takes some effort but the effort is very light. The instruction is to "touch and go." We touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It's a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather. It's a nonaggressive approach to being here.
Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don't want to let them go. Watching our personal video is a lot more entertaining than bringing our mind back home. There's no doubt that our fantasy world can be very juicy and seductive. So we train in using a "soft" effort, in interrupting our habitual patterns; we train in cultivating self-compassion.
We practice meditation to connect with maitri and unconditional openness. By not deliberately blocking anything, by directly touching our thoughts and then letting them go with an attitude of no big deal, we can discover that our fundamental energy is tender, wholesome and fresh. We can start to train as a warrior, discovering for ourselves that it is bodhichitta, not confusion, that is basic.

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The New Age
by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Every age is an age of change. This means also change in the social structure of the life of the people. There is never a still or static moment of time. As the time situations develop-there comes new ways of expressing wisdom - new ways of indulging or one might say corrupting people-and new ways of creating a structure for society. So therefore from a Buddhist point of view one sees that the world is not necessarily going to achieve either a Utopian Golden Age or for that matter going to enter a completely Dark Age.
Now some people may think that since we say that, what is the use of trying to do anything? The point is that the whole structure - everything - depends on us-individually. We may meditate. We may pray. We may work. But we have to do it ourselves.
We may think 'our strength and energy is given to us by some external power.' But nevertheless he who feels this energy or wisdom, whatever it may be, still has to have it simplified in human terms. And this is where the practice of meditation plays a very important part.
What was originally known as 'Westernization' no more belongs to the West-it is purely 'modernization.' The machines, inventions, and technological knowledge that have developed in the world do not belong to any of the continents but are just part of the modern age, the New Age. Equally, for that matter, the spiritual knowledge also does not belong to any particular place, and this does not mean that the wisdom has to be simplified or modified as if one were making it into a neat sort of packed lunch. We can't really POPULARIZE anything in fact. It has been the human element that has been the source of corruption in the spiritual society, both East and West. So therefore meditation is the greatest factor, force, strength and hope - this is everything.
I am sure that a lot of people have read and heard about the practice of meditation over and over again, but when I talk about meditation in this case it is not that of the mind pondering on different subjects, nor is it some means of achieving power, psychic power or the power of concentration, nor for that matter is it the business of trying to become a successful mentally controlled person. The meditation I am talking about is connected with life itself.
Suppose that everybody has a tremendous urge to practice meditation so they go off to retreats and become sanyasins or bikkus or hermits and so on - there would be no one left to run this world. However much we say we have independence, however much we think we ourselves are independent and self-sufficient, we still share and we still need what one might call the karmic link and the National karma of where we live.
Now with the structure of all countries being Americanized, with things developing as they are - vast machinery, vast organization which transcends the individual mind so that they can only be grasped in terms of computers, the whole thing has grown so big that to some people it is very frightening. Yet I would not say that this was particularly good, or for that matter particularly bad. The point is we cannot fight against it, and therefore our meditation has to be translated in terms of our pattern of life.
Living in such a world we really have to be practical for we cannot afford to divide society up into those who practice meditation and those who are workers, those who work in factories and those who are intellectuals and spend most of their lives in books. We can't afford to anymore - the world is too small. Once we have grasped this we see that we can only develop by understanding ourselves - that before we blame the world and before we try to save the world that first of all the whole question has to come back to us - OURSELVES - starting on the nearest one, that is - me, you, us. Now in order to start this change it is going to be necessary somehow to re-create the tribal structure that has been dissolved. The tribal structure that once existed.
For instance, if you are in a big city you may feel that there is no kind of link at all. Just one person or a couple of people walking in a street, or getting on a bus, can seem kind of desolate. There is nothing as a binding factor. The only binding factor may seem to be money, but even that is not a binding factor at all. This need to re-create the tribal structure can only be understood, of course, by those who live in the West and so have gone through the various stages of fascination for machine culture that the geographical East is going through at the moment, and of course we still are involved in it ourselves. Then comes the inevitable second stage. We feel we have no alternative, we are drawn into it and we have no control. I am sure that in the East when the technology is developed and this gigantic mechanism and material force has invaded completely that they too will understand.
So you see that the negative happenings of the new age also have a tremendous creative and positive element to them as well. One can't try to abandon life and try to create a new one, but rather let us try to work with it.
Let us make a beginning. Let us take a group of ten friends - in the sense that ten must have started with one. Without one there would be no two, no three, no four. Start with one of us. Now, how A will communicate to B, and how A will understand the A-ness of himself, say, before he has any idea of B - that is the real problem. This is the problem of communication. Now we have a tremendous problem of communication. In Buddhist terminology this is called duality. There is a tremendously thick wall built between us, between you and me, each of us like animals in a zoo. All of us in cages. There is a monkey from China here - and a gorilla from Africa next door - somehow we have to remove the bars. But if we are going to remove the bars then we have to develop some kind of strength within us. This is what is really lacking. And this strength comes from faith, real faith. And faith is quite different from pride or being self-centered. This faith comes from a willingness to open out. The whole trouble stems from here.
The structure of the future depends on us individually. We have arrived in an age where the study of the great wisdom of the world, religion and tradition however important they are, are not enough. There is one more urgent thing we have to do. We must create a structure which allows a real communication.
At the moment we merely have glimpses of communication that open and close. There is one person outside us and there is another busy monkey working inside us - this is known in Buddhist tradition as the monkey mind. The five senses are like five windows. The consciousness is like a monkey restlessly looking first in one window and then in another. But this is not enough
There has to be real communication. And someone has to start. If no one begins nothing will happen. And having started and developed and been able to contact one person then one is able to communicate to a third person, and then a fourth gradually develops and so on.
It's no use individuals trying to search for happiness in the beginning, only to find that there's no one to share their happiness with at the end. For, in the process of finding happiness we forget what we were looking for, and we find something else, and then we go on and on and on - and it is exactly that causes the confusion.
We have to see that the answer is not one of spirituality alone any more that it is one of politics alone. Some people may believe that if the whole world practiced meditation, suppose the whole world meditated for two hours every morning then went to their jobs and continued in business peacefully - some people think that would be enough. Other people think that we are fine as we are - some people live, some people die, in any case I have security, insurance, work, everything - as far as I'm concerned it doesn't affect me. Others among us think there should be some kind of revolution, perhaps communism, or let us say pure socialism is the only answer because the structure is wrong. And so you see there are many conflicting ideas coming in.
But altogether - there is violence. There is war in Vietnam. There is protest against the war in Vietnam, so one violence has started another violence. There is war in Europe and in America too. One violence creates another. And what Buddha teaches us is not just specifically to accept it, but to understand the causes of it and try to do something creative about it. We really must try to see through events to their source.
A window is smashed. Alright, we've done it. Next week the window is repaired again. We smash it again, and in a few days there's a big article in the newspaper. Then something else comes in the newspaper. People have forgotten about what happened because no positive contribution had been developed.
Before we start the protest, or if you like, the anarchy, we must first of all within ourselves try to overcome this need for an unnecessary kind of outlet of desire to do something. Turn this energy into opening up communication instead of just using it as aggressiveness.
The world is changing at tremendous speed and I would like to end by saying that I realize that we cannot recreate another kind of life by settling whole populations in the countryside with everybody doing manual work and handicrafts and so on, with all the wonderful thing that people have forgotten.
What we have to deal with is the kind of psychological materialism in our heads. We are allowing ourselves to be fed ideas and concepts from outside in a way that never lets us really be free anyway. It is inward materialism that we have to deal with first. It is the war that is going on inside our own heads to which we have to call the truce. Having done so doesn't mean that everyone has to become an enlightened person by any means. But at least if one person made an attempt at it and then began to work with someone else there would soon be a kind of communal working together.
Like in London it's not so much the colors, the chairs, the walls of the underground which depress us but the faces, the people moving like ants, people moving in and out, in and out, each with their own depression. Let us begin to create a body of people moving about and carrying their own light.
From " The New Age," by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Shambhala Sun, March 2004.

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The Great Spring
By Natalie Goldberg

I lived for a year and a half recently in St. Paul, Minnesota practicing Zen with one of Katagiri Roshi's dharma heirs. Roshi had been dead for a long time and still I missed him and did not know how to complete the relationship that had begun over twenty years before. I was frozen in the configuration we had together when he died-he was always the teacher and I forever would be the student. Now over a decade had passed. I wanted to move on, and in order to do that it seemed I had to move back to that northern state of long winter shadows, a place I left fifteen years earlier to plant my roots in Taos, New Mexico. It seemed I had to go back to that cold place in order to unfreeze.
A few months before the move, though, I pulled a muscle in my groin that would not let me cross my legs in the traditional zazen position. This did not please me. I'd been sitting cross-legged for twenty-five years, so my reflex even at a fancy dinner party was to have my legs intertwined on the upholstered oak chair under the pink linen tablecloth.
Structure in the zendo had been everything to me: straight back, butt on black round cushion, eyes unfocused, cast down at a forty-degree angle. Bells rung on time. Clip, clip. Everything had order. In a chaotic world it was comforting. Sitting in a chair in the zendo with feet flat on the floor seemed silly. If I was going to sit in a chair, I might as well have a cup of tea, a croissant-hell, why not be in a cafe or on a bench under an autumn tree.
So I did go every single day, like a good Zen student, except in the wrong direction-not to the Zen center in downtown St. Paul, but to Bread and Chocolate, a cafe on Grand Avenue. I walked there slowly, mindfully, and it was grand. I didn't bring a notebook. I just brought myself and I had strict regulations: I could only buy one chocolate chip cookie. And I ate that one attentively, respectfully, bite after bite at a table next to big windows. I felt the butter of it on my fingers, the chips still warm and melted. In the past, seven good bites would have finished it off. But the eating was practice now, the cafe a living zendo. Small bites. Several chews. Be honest-was this mindfulness or a lingering? This cookie would not last. Oh, crisp and soft, brown and buttery. How I clung. The nearer, the more appreciative was I, as it disappeared.
"Life is a cookie," Alan Arkin pronounced in "America's Sweethearts." I fell over the popcorn in my lap with laughter. One of the deep, wise lines in American movies. No one else in the theater was as elated. No one else had eaten the same single cookie for months running. I gleefully quoted Arkin, the guru, for weeks after. I could tell by people's faces: this, the result of all her sitting?
But nothing lasts forever. My tongue finally grew tired of the taste day after day. Was this straw in my mouth, this once great cookie? In the last weeks I asked only for a large hot water with lemon and wanted to pay the price for tea, but they wouldn't let me. I had become a familiar figure. So I left tips in a paper cup, and I sat. Not for a half hour or until the cookie was done-I sat for two, often three hours. Just sat there, nothing fancy, alongside an occasional man chopping away at a laptop, a mother, her son and his young friends, heads bent over brownies, eating their after-school snack, an elderly couple, sighing long over steaming cups, a tall, retired businessman reading the Pioneer Press. I sat through the whole Bush/Gore campaign and then the very long election, through a young teenage boy murdered on his bike by the Mississippi, the eventual capture of the three young men who did it for no reason but to come in from the suburbs for some kicks, and the sad agony of the boy's parents who owned a pizza parlor nearby.
St. Paul is a small city with a big heart. If I was still enough, I could feel it all-the empty lots, the great river driving itself under bridges, the Schmidt brewery emitting a smell that I thought meant the town was toasting a lot of bread, but found out later was the focal point of an irate neighborhood protest. In early fall when the weather was warm I sat on the wood and wrought-iron bench that was set out in front of the cafe under a black locust. I even sat out there in slow drizzles and fog when the streets were slick and deserted. After fifteen years in New Mexico, the gray and mist were a great balm.
Sometimes if I was across the river in Minneapolis I sat at Dunn Brothers cafe on Hennepin and then, too, at the one in Linden Hills. Hadn't this always been my writing life? To fill spiral notebooks, write whole manuscripts in local luncheonettes and restaurants? But now here was my Zen life, too, happening in a cafe at the same square tables only without a notebook. Hadn't I already declared that Zen and writing were one? In and out I'd breathe. My belly would fill, my belly would contract. I lifted the hot paper cup to my lips, my eyes now not down on the page but rather unfocused on the top of the chair pushed under the table across from me.
My world of meditation was getting large for me. By leaving the old structure, I was loosening my tight grip on my old Zen teacher. I was finally letting go of him. I was bringing my zazen out into the street. But who wants to let go of something you love? I did all this, but I did not recognize what was happening to me.
There is a recorded interview of me on a panel with an old dharma friend on December 21, 2001. It was a Saturday evening, the second winter of my return to Minneapolis, and the weather had tipped to thirty below. I'd just been driven across town by a kind young Zen student. No, not driven-the car slipped across black ice. I was so stunned by the time I was in front of the audience, most of my responses to the moderator's questions were, "You can find the answer to that in one of my books. Which book? I dunno." I only knew no matter how deluded you may be, the land told you you would not last forever. As a matter of fact, driving home that night might be the end of you.
By the last days of February, even the most fastidious homeowners (and believe me, St. Paul is full of them) had given up shoveling their walks. In early March I looked out my apartment window to the corner of Dale and Lincoln near posh Crocus Hill and watched the man across the street blaze out of his large many-floored old pale blue clapboard house, jacket flying open, with a long ax in his hand. While bellowing out months of confinement in piercing yelps, he hacked away at the ice built up by the curb. Behind him stood a massive crabapple, its branches frozen and curled in a death cry.
I had scheduled, for mid-April, a day-long public walking and writing retreat. I doubted now that it would take place. Where would we walk? In circles around the hallway of the zendo? My plan had been to meet at the zendo, write for two rounds, then venture out on a slow mindful stroll, feeling the clear placement of heel, the roll of toes, the lifting of foot, the bend of knee, the lowering of hip, as we made our way through the dank, dark streets of industrial St. Paul, across railroad tracks and under a bridge, to be surprised by a long spiral stone tunnel, opening into Swede Hollow along a winding creek and yellow grass (after all, when I planned it the year before, wasn't April supposed to be spring?), then climbing up to an old-fashioned, cast-iron high-ceilinged cafe with a good soup and delicious desserts where we could write again at small tables. I would not tell the students where we were going. I would just lead them out the zendo door into the warehouse district with cigarette butts in wet clusters, gathered in sidewalk cracks. We would walk past the Black Dog Cafe and the smokers hunched on the outside stoop and near the square for the Lowertown farmers' market where impossible summer and fresh-grown produce would arrive again.
In this city of large oaks, magnificent elms and maples, I managed to return to practice Zen at a zendo surrounded by concrete, where one spindly young line of a tree gallantly fought by a metal gate to survive. I'd renamed the practice center The Lone Tree Zendo. And, yes, in truth I did actually go there early mornings and Saturdays, Sundays, for weekend and week-long retreats. I was working on koans, ancient teaching stories, that tested the depth of your realization. I had to present my understanding and it never came from logic or the thinking brain. I had to step out of my normal existence and come face-to-face with images from eighth to tenth-century China: a rhinoceros fan, a buffalo passing through a window, an oak tree in the courtyard. The northern cold penetrated me as deeply as these koans. No fly, no bare finger could survive-even sound cracked. I was gouged by impermanence.
The first miserable weekend in April came. I looked at the roster of twenty-four faithful souls who had registered for the writing retreat. Two women from Lincoln, Nebraska were flying in. A woman from Milwaukee-a six-hour drive away-was leaving at 3:30 a.m. to make the 9:30 beginning. Such determination. Only in the Midwest, I thought. I noted with delight that Tall Suzy and her friend from Fargo were coming. She'd studied with me back in New Mexico. Mike, the Vietnam vet, from Austin, Minnesota was driving up too. I nervously fingered the page with the list of names.
The workshop date was the Saturday before Easter. The day came and miraculously it was in the low sixties. I hustled over early to Bread and Chocolate to grab a cookie and touch the recent center of my universe and then arrived a few minutes late for class. Everyone was silently meditating in a circle. I swirled into my place.
"We are going out for most of the day. You'll have to trust me. Remember: no good or bad. Just one step after another. We'll see different things. This is a walk of faith."
After two initial writing sessions we bounded outside, eager to be in the weak yet warming sun. But the weekend desolation of industrial St. Paul sobered us. One step after another. This was a silent walk so no one could complain-not that a Midwesterner would do such a thing. But I, an old New Yorker, had to shut up, too. I couldn't encourage, explain, apologize. We just walked bare-faced on this one early April day slow enough to feel this life. Over the still frozen ground to the tracks, crushing thin pools of ice with our boots. A left foot lifted and placed, then a right. The tunnel was ahead. Half of us were already walking through the yellow limestone spiral, built in 1856, a miracle of construction that seemed to turn your mind. Eventually we all made it through to the other side, to sudden country, the hollow, and the first sweetness of open land. Long pale grasses, just straightening up after the melting weight of snow, and thin unleafed trees gathered along the lively winding stream.
We had walked an hour and a half at the pace of a spider. I'd forgotten what this kind of walking does to you. You enter the raw edge of your mind, the naked line between you and your surroundings drops away. Whoever you are or think you are cracks off. We were soul-bare together in the hollow, the place poor Swedish immigrants inhabited a hundred years ago in cardboard shacks. Some people broke off and went down to the stream, put their hands in the cold water. I sat on a stone with my face in the sun. Then we continued on.
We didn't get to the cafe until almost two o'clock. The place was empty. We filled the tables and burst into writing. I remember looking up a moment into the stunned faces of two people behind the counter. Where did all these people suddenly come from? And none of them are talking?
I'd forgotten how strenuous it was to walk so slow for so long. I was tired.
When it was time to leave, I had planned to follow the same route back. Oh, no, the students shook their heads and took the lead almost at a trot. A short cut across a bypass over noisy 94 to the zendo. We arrived breathless in twenty minutes. Back in the circle, I inquired, "How was it?"-the first spoken words.
I looked around at them. My face fell. I'd been naive. They ran back here for safety. That walk had rubbed them raw. One woman began: "When we reached the tunnel, I was terrified to go through. It felt like the birth canal."
Another: "I didn't know where it would lead. I looked at all of us walking like zombies and began to cry. I thought of the Jews going to the chambers."
I remembered two kids in the hollow stopping their pedaling and straddling their bikes, mouths agape, staring at us. I had taken comfort in numbers and didn't worry about how we appeared to the outside. Of course, we must have looked strange.
What happened to us? they asked.
I checked in with my own body right then. Oh, yes, I felt the way I did after a five or seven day retreat, kind of shattered, new and tremulous. They were feeling the same.
One woman said, "I physically felt spring entering the hollow. It was right there when I slowed up enough to feel it. I opened my hand and spring filled it. I swear I also saw winter leaving. Not a metaphor. The real thing."
They were describing experiences I'd had in the zendo after long hours of sitting. But I'd thought that only within the confines of those walls and with that cross-legged position I loved, could certain kinds of openings occur. I'd wanted so badly to cling to the old structure I learned with my beloved teacher, the time-worn true way handed down from temples and monasteries in Japan, that he'd painstakingly brought to us in America. Yes, I loved everything he taught me, but didn't Buddha walk around a lot? What I saw now, with these students as witnesses, was that it was me who had confined my mind, grasped a practice I learned in my thirties, feeling nothing else was authentic.
Nat, what about writing? You'd said it was a true way, but even you didn't truly believe it. You only wanted to be with your old teacher again when you came back to Minnesota a year ago. You'd returned to St. Paul, it turns out, not to let go, but to find him. Like a child, you'd never really believed he'd died. Certainly you'd discover him again up here, but your body couldn't sit in the old way. You happened upon him but all new.
What was Zen anyway? There was you and me, living and dying, eating cake. There was the sky, there were mountains, rivers, prairies, horses, mosquitoes, justice, injustice, integrity, cucumbers. The structure was bigger than any structure I could conceive. I had fallen off the zafu, that old round cushion, into the vast unknown.
I looked again at these students in a circle. This day we were here and we experienced we were here. I could feel Roshi's presence. I thought he had died. No one had died. And in a blink of an eye none of us were here, only spring would move to summer, if we were very lucky, and no one blew up the world. But maybe there were other summers and winters out there in other universes. Nothing like a Minnesota winter, of course-that single solid thought I probably would die clinging to, like a life preserver, the one true thing I'd met after all my seeking.
After the last student left, I bent to put on my shoes. I was tired of being pigeonholed as a writer. Limited to one thing. Not Zen separate from hamburgers, not writing divided from breath. Only the foot placed down on this one earth.
If we can sit in a cafe breathing, we can breathe through hearing our father's last breath, the slow crack of pain as we realize he's crossing over forever. Good-bye, we say. Good-bye. Good-bye. Toenails and skin. Memory halted in our lungs: his foot, ankle, wrist. When a bomb is dropped it falls through history. No one act, no single life. No disconnected occurrence. I am sipping a root beer in another cafe and the world spins and you pick up a pen, speak and save another life: this time your own.
That night at three a.m. one of those mighty midwestern thunderstorms suddenly broke the dark early sky in an electric yellow. I gazed out the cold glass pane. Either in my head or outside of it-where do thoughts come from?-three words resounded: The Great Spring. The Great Spring. Together my students and I had witnessed the tip of the moment that green longed for itself again. I realized in all these years, Roshi had never been outside of me.
Natalie Goldberg is the author of Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, Long Quiet Highway, and Thunder and Lightning. Her most recent book is a collection of poems and paintings, Top Of My Lungs, published by Overlook Press. She has been a zen practitioner for the last 25 years.
From "The Great Spring"" by Natalie Goldberg. Shambhala Sun, January 2003.

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Everything Is Controlled By the Mind

The passage below comes from the Cloud of Jewels Sutra. It indicates that all phenomena are productions of mind and that everything is created by mind. Ordinary beings allow the mind to wander at will, thus enmeshing them in confused and harmful thoughts, but bodhisattvas are advised to train the mind in order to bring it under control.
All phenomena originate in the mind, and when the mind is fully known all phenomena are fully known. For by the mind the world is led...and through the mind karma is piled up, whether good or bad. The mind swings like a firebrand, the mind rears up like a wave, the mind burns like a forest fire, like a great flood the mind carries all things away. Bodhisattvas, thoroughly examining the nature of things, remain in ever-present mindfulness of the activity of the mind, and so do not fall into the mind's power, but the mind comes under their control. And with the mind under their control, all phenomena are under their control.

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Interview with Hannah Nydahl
Virginia, July 1995

In 1969, Lama Ole Nydahl and his wife Hannah became the first western students of His Holiness the XVI Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpai Dorje, one of the greatest yogis of this century, and the head of the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. His Holiness had a profound influence on their lives. He asked Hannah and Ole to bring Buddhism to the West. For the last 22 years they have been traveling non-stop, teaching and setting up meditation centers around the world.
Hannah Nydahl is a much sought after translator and interpretator of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. She divides her time between translating for the lamas at the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute in New Delhi, India, participating in various Buddhist text translation projects, organizing schedules and visits of high Rinpoches in the lineage, and traveling around the world with Lama Ole.
Kagyu Life International: How did it happen that you spent so much time in Asia?
Hannah Nydahl: Ole and I went to Asia the first time in the 60's. We connected with Buddhism and stayed there for a few years. There was no Tibetan Buddhism in the West then, so the connection with the East was still very important. My function became to translate for the Tibetan lamas, and help them organize their schedules. Also, for many years, Ole and I arranged pilgrimage tours to the East, taking approximately 100 people at a time, every year or two. This gave me a lot of contact with Asia. For the past five years I have also been involved as a translator for Tibetan teachers at KIBI (the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute) in New Delhi.
For people starting on the Buddhist path today, the situation is quite different. You can become a Buddhist in your own country, and learn and practice everything there. It may be good for your development to go on a pilgrimage, in order to visit places carrying a special blessing such as Bodhgaya, the place of Buddha's enlightenment. But it is not necessary to go and live in the East. I only go myself when I have work to do there.
How did you learn Tibetan?
In the late 60's when we met with Buddhism, very few texts were translated, and few teachers spoke English. We had to learn Tibetan ourselves, and I started by learning the alphabet from Tarab Tulku at the University in Denmark. Then, when we stayed in India in the Himalayas and did our practice, we had to translate all the meditation texts ourselves. When we did the Ngondro practices we started with the prostration text. I looked up almost every word in the dictionary and slowly translated the text. It was the same with the other parts of Ngondro. At that time we were in a retreat-like setting and did not talk much to people, so we did not get to practice any spoken Tibetan. To practice speaking it we had to stay in the Tibetan camps where nobody knew English.
Later, we invited the lamas to Europe and there was no one to translate, so I had to learn more Tibetan in order to translate for them. It was a natural process. Translating became part of my role, and Ole went into the teaching activity. He is a born teacher, and not a born translator (Hannah laughs). If he were to translate, he would give his own teaching (still laughing). So it fits like this.
Again, the situation today is very different. Now many teachings and texts are translated and many translators are available, so one can easily practice Tibetan Buddhism without knowing Tibetan.
How and when did you decide to give up the traditional family role? Did it happen early in your marriage?
When we went to Asia on our honeymoon and met with Buddhism, we stayed there several years to learn and practice the Buddhist teachings intensively. Later, we got the position of working full time for the Dharma. H.H. the 16th Karmapa was very precise in his instructions to us. He wanted us to go back to Europe and work for the Dharma. At that time it was not possible to combine this work with normal family life - it was a matter of making a choice. The choice was easy, there are enough children in this world, and what we were doing at that time was more important than having our own children. Today it is a different situation. Becoming a Buddhist does not mean changing one's lifestyle as we did.
You and Ole were the ones who actually brought Tibetan Buddhism to Europe.
It became our responsibility because there was no Tibetan Buddhism available in Europe at that time. Our development was not a typical one, it was a specific function at a specific time.
How do you maintain your balance when so many people make demands on your time, and your every move is watched as being significant?
Making demands on one's time is OK, and actually this is not a big problem. Concerning people watching one's every move, I would like to mention something of general interest. In the West we have a tendency to become a little artificial and fanatic around our teachers. We look at the teacher, watch every move he makes, and give special meaning to each word he utters. In Europe we have this tendency quite a lot; I don't know how it is in the States. We should try to be more natural towards teachers, towards Rinpoches. Our devotion can be kept internally - it does not have to show on the outside in an extreme way. It is not necessary to be physically close to the teacher, or look at him all the time. If one has trust or devotion, this does not have to be shown outside. It is important that, as Buddhists, we give more care to the kind of impression we make on the outside world, since people already have a hard enough time understanding what Buddhism is, and we don't want to be confused with the many cults coming up these days.
How do you maintain your balance living in the shadow of such powerful men as Ole and Shamar Rinpoche?
No problem! (she laughs) I do not have ambitions in that way. I don't see myself as being in anybody's shadow. I am just myself.
In your practice of Buddhism over the last 25 years, what are the stages of development you have seen in yourself?
From the moment I first met with pure Buddhist teachings, it was like a revelation. Since childhood I always had many questions in my mind - I wondered about the meaning of existence and such things. Denmark is a Christian country, but not very religious, and the Christianity I met there did not give me the answers I was looking for. I could not accept the concept of one creator God, the rhetoric that if you did not believe in God you were doomed forever, or that people who did not believe in God were lost. This never made sense to me. I was also very concerned about what happened to the mind when one died. I wondered a lot about these things when I was very young.
Later in puberty, I was involved in a lot of mundane activities (she laughs). I got distracted, and was not so occupied with these questions. Then, I met Ole and we started taking psychedelics. For me this was a continuation of looking for answers and especially trying to explore the mind. Apart from breaking some rough concepts about the world being solid and real, and thus getting a taste of the illusory nature of things, psychedelics did not give any answers either. The problem with them was that one clung to the experiences as being real instead, which was even worse and more difficult to purify.
The first direct Buddhist teachings I read were in a book called Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines in 1968. In the beginning of the book was a text by Gampopa The Garland of Precious Jewels, translated by Evans-Wenz. This is a collection of teachings presented in sets of advice that starts on an ordinary relative level and takes you through to the absolute teachings. It gave answers to all the things I had wondered about. It was a very strong experience for me, like coming home.
After that, we met our teacher the Karmapa, and started to practice. Ever since then, it has been a process of trying to integrate the teachings as much as possible. It is amazing how vast and profound the teachings are, there is no end to them. Every instruction and practice I was given always confirmed the truth of Buddha's teachings and took me deeper into understanding. Feeling how much the Dharma has helped me, and seeing how much benefit it has for other people too, I feel extremely grateful to be able to use my life the way I do.
Have you ever doubted or been discouraged about the Dharma?
No. If something unpleasant or disappointing happens, it only confirms what the teachings say about the impermanent and changing quality of everything conditioned. As a child, I had an easy life, which maybe is not always so useful for learning to deal with difficulties, but at the same time it helped me gain some inner stability which has been useful in my later work.
How can one maintain a pure view and not be naive?
This is where the Dharma helps you. If you do not know the Dharma, then you tend to live in some unrealistic illusion and think that things are what they are not; you give things a permanent existence which they do not have. You may think something is wonderful, then suddenly it is not wonderful anymore. Or you see defects, start judging and thinking everything is terrible, there is no solution and you want to commit suicide or whatever. I can understand how people can get desperate if they don't know the Dharma - those who look at the world without seeing the whole picture can be terrified by what they see. But once you know the Dharma, it is not so bad. You can see the potential in people, get the right perspective. Even when there are wars and catastrophes, you know, at least theoretically, that this is not how things really are, and it is only a question of everybody understanding the true nature of things for these sufferings to stop. If you meet people who behave strangely, you do not take it personally. You think more of how you can advise them. It is no longer a private thing. This is how the Dharma helps us. To have the pure view means to see how things are in their essence.
What about the situation when people who are close to you turn against you?
The teachings say that we can understand impermanence by seeing how friends turn into enemies and enemies turn into friends. This is very true. Of course it is sad when a good friend turns against you, something is destroyed, but this has not happened to me as much as to Ole. Because of his function and dominant appearance, he is in more situations where people either adore or hate him. Some people like to see him as their idol and try to imitate him. Sometimes it is these exact same people who turn against him out of pride and jealousy - they suddenly make Ole into the devil. Ole does not take this personally. It is a pity when it happens but we learn a lot through this. One learns about the mentality of people and about the different approaches people can have. You learn how to deal better with situations, how to relate to people, and how to prevent these things from happening again. You can see certain tendencies in people and then be more careful about the kinds of relationship you have with these people - for their own sake.
Do you have any plans to write a book?
I have had different suggestions from people about this. One suggestion is to write a book about Dharma experiences, and another is to write about being a woman in Buddhism. It might be useful, but it is a question of time, it takes time to write a book. Ole is better at utilizing every single second - he can produce books simultaneously with his other activity. I cannot do that, so we will see what becomes possible.
Could you speak about the special role of women in the Dharma?
When you practice Buddhism, it is a very individual thing and not so much a question of whether one is a man or a woman. Each individual has his or her capacity and conditions - both outer and inner. In the West I do not see a big difference between men and women. It is more in the Eastern cultures that there is a big difference in their roles. Concerning the Buddhist methods, there is not much difference, one just has to use them. Generally, attachment is more difficult for a woman to dissolve, and men have to perhaps work more with aggressions - but it is very individual. We are all human beings, and most have a combination of disturbing emotions. So there is not that big of a difference between man and woman when it comes to practicing the Dharma.
You hold so much knowledge and wisdom from being around teachers and translating for so many years. Why don't you teach more?
There is only so much time and I am involved in many different kinds of activities already. Once one starts something, one should do it properly. I do not mind teaching, but when I am together with Ole, it is more natural that he teaches. When I am not with him, I mainly translate and organize for the Tibetan lamas. Somehow, teaching has not been part of my activity yet. Also, His Holiness was very specific about the importance of Ole and I working together, and, if I was to have an independent teaching program on top of everything else, the already too little time we spend together would be reduced to zero.
Every teacher has a different style. This can be difficult since we tend to prefer one style and disapprove of others.
The confusion may have to do with us not distinguishing between the different kinds of teachers and thinking the teacher must be a Rinpoche or somebody very well known before we bother to listen to his teachings. One's main teacher will naturally be somebody one likes and in whom one has confidence. It is psychologically normal to learn better and be more attentive if the teacher has a style one feels at home with. But we don't always seem to understand that we need to study the basic teachings in order to understand and practice the path in a correct way. For this we can listen to teachers who are not necessarily enlightened or especially charismatic. In such cases the main thing is that he knows what he is talking about. If we focus more on the Dharma than on the person teaching it, we also protect ourselves against spiritual manipulation, which is good for everybody.

Kagyu Life International, No.4, 1995
Copyright ©1995 Kamtsang Choling USA

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Interview with Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche
for the CTF newsletter and The View Magazine March 19, 1998
(questions by Mikaela and Marcia, interpretation by Erik)

Question: What do you feel is most vital for your Dharma groups in the West, both in Denmark and in the United State that are establishing centers?

Rinpoche: First of all, the view of Dzogchen or Mahamudra and the practice, should not be in name only. It shouldn't be mere words, but the view actually applied. That is the way to uphold the tradition of the definitive meaning. Many masters give teachings on the nature of mind. It was the tradition of my father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, who especially emphasized the nature of mind. Whenever he taught, that would be what he placed the highest importance on, the understanding of the nature of mind. If his followers could actually practice the view and really realize it, that would be the best offering to give to Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. Moreover it would be what they could really take with them when they leave this life. It is what is of the highest benefit. It is the single most sufficient practice. If you have it, everything is perfect. If you don't, then so many doors are closed.

Question: What would you like to see your students to do in those places in Denmark and the United States?

Rinpoche: They need to turn the three wheels. Best is if one person can turn all three wheels. The first is called the wheel of beneficial action, which means the activity that provides the facilities for people to study and practice. In connection with that, it is wonderful to undertake the tasks of constructing temples and shrines, building or offering statues, tankas, stupas and printing books. These are representations of enlightened body, speech and mind. Once these things have been gathered and built, it is of utmost importance to take care of their preservation. All of that is beneficial endeavor.

The second wheel is the study wheel of learning which means to listen to, understand and reflect upon the words of the Buddha, the teachings. The third is the meditation wheel of simplicity where you go through the steps of training and meditation. This includes the different details of the preliminaries, the main part, and so forth, until you progress to more and more subtle practices. Finally you get to the point of meditation practice where you don't move at all. You don't speak; you don't need to form any concepts, either. That is the deepest practice. This is a very reasonable progression. When one has a lot of concepts, development stage with big visualizations are important as their remedy to these thoughts. If one feels like talking a lot, then the remedy for that is to say a lot of mantras. As these fade, later you can remain totally without saying a word, without thinking a thing. That is how to train.

These three wheels are mutually helpful. The Buddha said beings differ in their inclinations, so therefore, let whoever feels most inclined to a particular one of the three wheels do that.

Question: The Dharma is often criticized in the West as not being engaged in social service, not offering the kind of help that unfortunate people need. How would you address this criticism?

Rinpoche: In Buddhism, the six paramitas, the six transcendent actions are considered very important. The first of these is giving; being generous. There are different ways of being generous. The first one mentioned is the giving of material things. Second is called the giving of protection against fear. The third one is the giving of wisdom, the giving of truth.

The third, the giving of wisdom, is the highest act of generosity. Why is that? The giving of material things makes our physical life comfortable. The giving of protection against fear can alleviate the deepest anxiety, the deepest; the most unpleasant feelings' people have. Therefore, the giving of protection against of fear actually is of deeper benefit than simple material things. You could be deeply concerned with the welfare of others. You could go out and spend huge funds on making life comfortable for others. However, no matter how hard you try, even if you said "the whole world is yours, I give it to you"; the other person can only enjoy that until the end of his life; no longer. However if you can make true insight, perfect wisdom grow forth, in another person, that can make a permanent end to suffering forever. In your opinion which is the most beneficial?

Who can give the perfect knowledge? It should be someone whose being has already been liberated through realization. To liberate your own being through realization, you have to be realized. Therefore, someone who makes up their mind to spend the rest of their life in retreat is someone who aims at becoming able to benefit all sentient beings. If that is the situation, such a person is worthy of deep respect. Otherwise, if that person is merely sitting there for him or herself, and on top of that, not even working and we have to provide the food, it is a really selfish retreat.

Question: Most westerner students are going to be able to devote that much time to spending their whole life in retreat. Based on this assumption, what is the best combination of study and practice, in your vision for Western students?

Rinpoche: I feel that it is very important to devote every year a couple of months for retreat. Secluded practice is very important.

Question: In a Western job many of us only have three weeks of holidays in a whole year. If people did have the leisure to take a few months out of the year, how would you divide the time between study and practice?

Rinpoche: There are three things that are important in a spiritual person's life. One is to provide the means, in other words, to work. The purpose of taking a job is to get money so that one can use that money to do something meaningful; to study and practice.About study, the purpose of study is to know how to practice. Practice here means the meditation practice. At least one needs to study enough to know how to do the particular practice one is doing; even if one is not studying in a very detailed, long term way. One needs to know what kind of perspective, what kind of view, what kind of training, what kind of behavior, what kind of results should come out of their practice. Otherwise, since our habitual tendencies, the deeply ingrown habits of forming concepts are very subtle; we may pretend to ourselves that we can easily practice a very high form of meditation. Whether or not this is really genuine, we ourselves need to ascertain; we need to be totally free of doubt. The way to be free of doubt is through learning. It is important from that angle.

Question: Is there a way to combine Dharma, worldly life and work in the West? What should westerners do if we want to practice but still need to have a job?

Rinpoche: The main practice in Buddhism is, after recognizing the view, to compose your mind in equanimity and continue like that. That is the main practice and for that practice there are conducive conditions and unfavorable conditions. Conducive factors for the training of equanimity are compassion, devotion and renunciation in the sense of the wish to be free. It also includes being conscientious, mindful, alert as well as diligent and intelligent.

What are the unfavorable conditions? It is to allow one's attention to be distracted outwardly. It is to be complacent, lazy and careless. All of these make it more difficult to remain in composure. This is especially true when we are caught up in the five toxic emotions of desire, hatred, dullness, envy and conceit. It is very hard to be calm and clear at the same time.

Of course the main thing is your mind; what is it you really want? If you take it upon yourself, to really want to practice, and not I want anything else, then complacency, laziness, distractions, won't have that hold over you any longer. They cannot make obstacles in the same way as before. Therefore, someone who is really determined to sustain the view, even when involved in so-called ordinary activities, will have the attitude of being among children building castles of sand. You can't say the person is uninvolved, because he or she is doing a job, but on the other hand you can't say that he or she really is, because of not being attached.

Honestly isn't it true that if we feel something is of vital importance, whether it is the world, or our spiritual practice, if it is imprinted on our mind that this is the most important, that nothing else matters, we will always find the time. We will not be that distracted from it, and we will definitely have a chance to reach accomplishment, to reach the results.

Question: When would you say that the Dharma has truly been implanted in the West?

Rinpoche: When the minds of the students have been softened up and are gentle, peaceful and compassionate. Likewise when the view that is the direct remedy against ego-clinging, the root cause of samsara has been understood and applied, that is the establishing of the Dharma. Honestly speaking, this is genuine.

Question: Do you see that those qualities are already happening? Is the Dharma implanted in the West?

Rinpoche: When you see the great number of Dharma centers, retreat places and ordained sangha in the West, those are definitely the signs that show the presence of the Dharma.

Question: Finally what is the main difference between the analytical approach of training and simply resting in meditation?

Rinpoche: There are two main approaches, one is analytical and the other is the simply resting way of meditation.They each get their names from their main emphasis. It is not the case that one is only analytical and you never compose the mind; it isn't like that. One is primarily analytical and the other approach is primarily one of resting meditation, rather than examining. But when training in resting meditation there always has been some analytical questioning prior to that. There has to be some prelude. For example, there is the examining of the moving mind and the quiet mind and the arising, dwelling and ceasing of thoughts and so forth. However there is one thing that is totally without analytical attitude and that is what is called natural mind, untainted by thoughts of the three times. That itself is free from any judgments, any discrimination, it is totally non-analytical. The word analytical meditation doesn't mean that one analyzes forever; because then it wouldn't be meditation. It means one analyzes until the topic of analysis is exhausted and there is some resolution arrived at, at which point the meditation begins.

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Interview with

JETSUN KUSHAB

Could you tell us please something about your family?
I was the oldest of four children. One brother and sister passed away very young, while
my youngest brother became the Sakya Trizin. My father never became the head of the
Sakya lineage; he passed away in the year of the Tiger (1950), at the age of 49. My
mother had passed away three years earlier, when I was 10. At that time my brother
was only three years old. From then on, my aunt, our mother's older sister, looked after
us. She took us to Ngor Monastery, south of Shigatse. There we met our root lama,
Ngawang Lodro Shenpen Nyima or briefly Tampa Rinpochey, and we received teachings.
We received the Path and Fruit teachings from him, both in the 'public' and 'private'
presentations. We had almost reached the end of the personal transmission of Path and
Fruit, when our root lama passed away. He was 75 years old. Another of his students,
Ngor Khangsar Shabdrung Rinpochey, took over from him and finished the teachings.
Later, Khangsar Shabdrung Rinpochey, Ngawang Lodro Tenzin Nyingpo, came to Sakya
and gave us another teachings, called the Collections of Sadhanas.
While my brother was doing his Vajrakilaya retreat, monks from Kham came to
Sakya and requested Path and Fruit teachings from him. But as he was in retreat,
my aunt appointed me to give the three months transmission in the Lam-Dre Ngawang
Chodrak tradition. I was 18 years old.
When did you start to meditate?
When I was six, I did my first small meditations on Manjushri and Saraswati, accompanied
by a teacher, not alone. Then, when I was eight, I became a nun. When I was 10, I did a
one month Vajrapani retreat, also with a teacher. At the age of 17, I received the Path and
Fruit teachings, together with Sakya Trizin. After I completed a few retreats, including
that of Hevajra and other deities. Then I gave the Path and Fruit transmission for the
first time.
When did you come to exile?
In 1959, when I was 21, we escaped to India. I remained there from 1959 to 1971. First
we went to the American Missionary Refugee camp for Tibetans in Kalimpong. I tried
to learn English there, because we generally spoke Hindi. I was very shy, so I did not
speak a lot of English. Since I came to Canada, I have had a lot of practice - because I
have to.
In 1962, I went to Shimla and worked there with Tibetan children in Tibetan nursery.
I worked as a nurse, changing diapers, fixing beds and serving food. But after nine months
I got sick, so I had to quit.
Once we arrived in India, I decided to give up my robes. In 1964, my husband's
family, the Luding family, and my aunt arranged our marriage. After taking their
decision they asked us, and we both agreed. Although we knew each other quite well,
it was a prearranged marriage.
We had five children: four sons and a daugter. My first son was born in 1965. My
daugter passed away, while three of my sons live with me in Canada. One, Shabdrung
Rinpochey, was born in 1967 and now lives in India. When we came to Canada in 1971,
my youngest son was just 10 months old.
Why did you decide to live in Canada?
Sakya Trizin and I had a old friend, a woman who was half French, half German. She
actually decided for me. She felt that my situation, bringing up five children in India,
was not so good. I thought that I was doing well, that I was very rich - but I guess she
thought that I was very poor. She asked me if I wanted to go to Canada. She knew
the Canadian Ambassador very well. She then talked to him, and he added my name
to the list of those being considered for resettlement. We first arrived in Alberta and
only later we moved to Vancouver. While my husband worked on a farm, feeding the
cattle, I was working in the house, cooking the whole day and feeding the kids - a
terrible experience because it never finished the whole day long.
Are there any differences between living in India and here?
It is much the same. There's no big difference. A lot of people say to me: 'You lost your
country, you must feel lonely and homesick.' I never had the feeling of loneliness and
of being homesick. I don't know why, I never had it. I never feel lonely. If you are alone,
you find something to read, or you do a meditation. We Tibetans did not have television.
Here, if you're lonely, you watch television. People here watch television like zombies.
Could you tell us something about your lineage, in particular the Khon lineage?
The Khon lineage originates not in our worldly realm. It comes from a heavenly realm.
Three sons came to our workd from that realm. While the two older brothers returned
to the heavenly realm, the youngest one married the daughter of a raksa or harmful
spirit. Literally, the word Khon means 'against each other', or enemy. After the marriage
the raksa family and the Khon family fought against each other, which is why the Khons
became known as enemies of the harmful spirits.
Sachen Kunga Nyingpo, Sonam Tsenmo, Rinchen Dakpa Gyaltsen, Sakya Pandita,
Drogon Chogyal Phakpa were the first lineage holders of the Khon. Then the lineage
was passed down until Wangdu Nyingpo and his four sons: Pema Dhondup Wangchuk
(we call him Pitu), Kunga Rinchen, Ngodrup Pompa and Kunga Gyaltsen, youngest of
the sons. Pitu and Kunga Gyaltsen together had one son, Dorje Rinchen, because they
shared the same wife.
Dorje Rinchen became the Sakya Trizin, but did not have any children himself. He
was the Sakya government. This is when the two brothers who were both fathers of
Dorje Rinchen established the two houses of Sakya. The younger brother, Kunga
Rinchen, founded the Phuntsog Phodrang, while the older brother, Pitu, instituted the
Dolma Phodrang.
From Pema Dhondup Wangchuk the Dolma Phodrang lineage passed to Tashi
Rinchen, Kunga Nyingpo, Tashi Trinley Rinchen, then to Kunga Rinchen who was
Sakya Trizin's and my father, and then to Sakya Trizin. On the Phuntsog Phodrang
side, the lineage was passed on from Kunga Rinchen to Kunga Sonam, then to
Samling Chiku Wangdu, Ngawang Thudob Wangchuk, to Jigdal Dagchen Sakya,
and he will pass it on to one of his five sons.
What does the bone and blood lineage mean?
We talk about these lineages only in relation to human beings. Religiously and spiritually
they have no meaning. The mothers' lineage is the blood lineage, while the bone lineage
refers to the father's side. In Tibet, when it came to marriage, it was important to observe
the bone lineage for seven generations, and the blood lineage for four generations. After
these generations you could marry. That is the only reason.
Compared to other traditions, what is different in the Sakyapa?
In Sakya, we talk about the two families, the Khon families. Inside these two families
and lineages, there are lamas of other lineages born into.
For example, my brother, Sakya Trizin, is a reincarnation of the Nyingmapa lama
Abong Terton, from east Tibet. This has been recognized by the Nyingmapas very
clearly - there is no doubt about it. Before Abong Terton died, he told his students: "I
will die this year. Next year you should go to Sakya and look for newborn babies. I will
be there, and you will recognize me. But you cannot bring me back here. My duty in
eastern Tibet is done, and my future task will be in central Tibet, with the people there.
I will have to stay with their family. You cannot bring me back, but you can visit me.'
Abong Terton had three sons. While the middle son visited Sakya, he recognized his
father in my brother. At that time my brother was six years old; he was reciting all kinds
of prayers that he had not been taught, very much like Abong Terton.
We Sakyas understood very well and do not doubt it. However our side thought he
was the reincarnation of my grandfather:
In Sakya there was a Mahakala temple, facing south. It was rebuilt by my grandfather.
During the restoration, he left a small skylight open in the upper southwest corner, so that
light could enter the temple. When my borther was maybe seven or eight years old, he
visited the temple for the first time. Right away he asked: 'What happened to the window?
Where is the window?' 'Somehow somebody closed the window,' replied the old man
beside him, with tears in his eyes. The old man had known my grand