| Buddhist Monk 2005-12-15, 1:03 am |
| Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism - Quotations by Zen Master Rama, Dr.
Frederick Lenz
Main Page:
www.ramaquotes.com
Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism:
www.ramaquotes.com/html/introduction_tibetan.html
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Zen Master Rama:
"Tibetan teachers were non-traditional. You go see the enlightened
teacher, he's smoking Havana's finest and Havana hasn't even been
discovered yet. That's when you knew you had a powerful teacher.
It is the Tibetan Buddhist belief that all heavens and hells are
created within our own minds.
Everything is inside you. Gosh, didn't your mom or dad tell you that?
There is no external anything. There is only the mind and the mind is
endless reality, endless perfection.
The Tibetan doctrines are far reaching. They are really very similar
in essence, to the doctrines of yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and the very
early American Indian religions. A common thread unites them all, the
perception of that which is truth.
Each aspect of the teaching must be individually validated for it to be
meaningful.
Words are pointing in a direction towards something. It is good not to
take them too literally.
The esoteric or inner teachings are experiences in infinite awareness.
The esoteric teachings aren't something you can express. They are
experiences in the planes of light, the causal realities.
The secret teachings of the oral traditions suggest that it's possible
to take the thousand lifetimes it would have taken to become conscious
of consciousness and to compress it into one lifetime.
The Tibetan Rebirth Process is based on the idea is that we are an
aggregate; a human being is not one individual self. We're composed of
many, many selves, and that these selves are growing and progressing
within us. As Walt Whitman said, "I contain multitudes."
The Tibetan Rebirth Process is the awareness that it is possible for a
human being, a sentient being, to go through hundreds or thousands of
lifetimes within one incarnation.
The idea behind the sophistications of the rebirth process is that this
is the bardo. The bardo is not a place that you go to at the time of
death. The bardo, or the bardos, are the levels of awareness, fields
of attention that we pass through, and we're in them right now.
Reality is not any particular way. If you're in a hopeful level of
attention, then you could be in the pit of hell and see possibilities
in it. If you're in a dead state of mind, then heaven would not
entrance you.
Pilgrimages are journeys to places of power. People sometimes make
pilgrimages to the caves where Milarepa or other great yogis meditated.
Limitations exist within the mind. Freedom exists within the mind.
Heaven exists within the mind. Hell exists within the mind.
In Buddhist practice a great deal of time is spent practicing mandala
meditation. You learn to visualize and hold simultaneous concepts in
the mind during meditation.
When you use the tumo, you just produce a tremendous amount of heat.
Tibetan yogis could generate tremendous heat, which saved terrifically
on heating bills, and it's still quite useful in the Sierras. All my
friends freeze and I walk around in a t-shirt.
Because someone is a lama or is part of a monastic order or claims to
be part of a succession, doesn't really mean they know anything.
Always examine the individual's consciousness, their ability to
transmit light.
A Tulku is a Buddhist master who has left his body and reincarnated in
the body of a child. Usually, his former students will find him and
bring him back to the monastery, because they want to be with their
master again.
Once you go through all those traditional forms you reach a point where
you have to then get creative with God-realization. That's the essence
of the secret teachings.
Rather than being overly concerned with whether someone is a Tulku or
not, how about you becoming a Tulku?! Why not focus on the clear light
of reality inside of your own mind, as Buddha suggested, and become
enlightened?
There are all kinds of wonderful stories about practitioners of tantra
who seemingly break all the rules and yet are enlightened. They don't
try to break the rules. Let us just say that life draws us in
different directions, sometimes simultaneously.
As you are able to eliminate attractions and aversions, the idea of
yourself washes away and with it, so do your limitations. You have an
endless infinite mind.
All heavens and all hells are within the mind. Your mind is endless;
you just haven't discovered it yet. You're just living in small
sections of it. You can discover, of course, the rest of it.
In the Buddhist thangkas they're all having a very, very serious party
up in the high astral...but above that is the unmanifest. You can't
put that on a thangka. There's no way to paint it.
Look at the world, happy one day, sad the next; laughing one day,
crying the next. Put your mind into the Diamond Vajra Sutra, into the
ultimate spiritual vehicle, the ten thousand radiances of
enlightenment.
It is only by learning to direct the mind toward that which is infinite
and pure, and to control the part of our nature that is destructive to
ourselves or others, that we can truly progress along the pathway to
enlightenment which leads to the realms of light.
What causes us to change is not simply the detonation of the self.
What causes the change is that in-between restructuring of the self,
one is directing oneself towards light.
In the Tibetan Rebirth Process, we use and develop what we call the
Caretaker Personality. The idea is that we really aren't a person, we
just think we are. We think we're people because we've been told we're
people.
So, you can modify and change the personality structure in advanced
meditation to suit the occasion. We're not simply modifying it for
social occasions, but we're continually moving to an upgraded structure
of being.
Our knowledge, experience, and wisdom can also assist us during the
intermediate stage of the bardo plane when we are between death and
rebirth - in between all things.
Life is infinite ecstasy in the planes of infinite ecstasy. It's
infinite suffering in the planes of infinite suffering. It's infinite
boredom in the planes of infinite boredom.
They had a terrible class structure in Tibet...a terrible, terrible
system there, particularly regarding women, awful suppression.
In 1950 the Communist Chinese invaded Tibet, massacred hundreds of
thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and destroyed or desecrated the
Tibetan monasteries."
- Zen Master Rama
www.ramaquotes.com
Thank you in advance for your religious tolerance.
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