So we had better think again and use our common sense. 

If we let our mind mistreat us so that we spend our lives suffering and making others suffer around us, that’s a sign of a lack of common sense. The thoughts and words that come from a disturbed state of mind can be considered “negative.” 

Instead of complaining about our fate, if we cultivate altruism and compassion, so that those “positive” states of mind improve our well-being and that of others, that shows that we do have common sense.

JIGME KHYENTSE RINPOCHE (born 1964) 

Oral Advice translated by Matthieu Ricard

Sand Mandala by Tibetan Monks in Dothan, AL. March 2015

Please note that Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche does not say that thoughts and words coming from a disturbed state of mind are negative, but that they can be considered "negative." This is important !

 

Churning water.

I would like to share with you Matthieu Ricard's thought of the Week, directly from his Newsletter - suscribe to it !
 

Getting butter from milk is only possible because milk already contains cream. No one ever made butter by churning water. The prospector looks for gold in rocks and not in wood chips. Likewise, the quest for perfect enlightenment only makes sense because the buddha-nature is already present in every being. Without that nature, all efforts would be futile. 

JAMGÖN KONGTRUL LODRÖ THAYE (1813-1899)

 

 

Matthieu Ricard is a Tibetan Buddhist Monk, author and Photographer born in France in 1946. After completing his doctoral thesis in Molecular Genetics in 1972, he decided to forsake his scientific career and concentrate on the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. He has been the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama since 1989.

The Wheel of Life

In his book "The Wheel of Life", John Blofeld tells us about his life journey into Buddhism, his unusual attraction toward it during his British childhood, and his further discovery and practice of it in Asia, mostly in pre-red China and Tibet. His book, written in a beautiful style,describes the errances of an average human being on his way to something he is not quite sure about with all the tours and detours, the difficulties, the mistakes, the delays, as each one of us experience them at one time or another in our progressions in Zen or Budo.

In his quest, Mr Blofeld practiced various forms of Buddhism and finally realized that one particular Tibetan tradition fitted him the best.  Among the different traditions he practiced Zen (or Chan as it is named in China) for 9 full month in a Chinese Monastery.

Here is how he describes Zen in comparison to the other ways of Buddhism.

"In time I discovered that it had been a great error to suppose that Zen is a simple approach to Truth. Despite the absence of insuperable linguistic difficulties, it is in some ways the most difficult of all possible approaches, just a a short cut to the top of a steep mountain  is the most arduous route for the climber... "

Mountain climbing... It would come to nobody's mind to climb mount Everest without proper training; not only one needs to have developed a serious knowledge of the particulars of mountain climbing - through climbing smaller mountains, and practicing repelling, or other practices I am not aware of, because I dwas born on the ocean and don't know much about Mountain climbing; but it also requests serious physical conditioning such as endurance training, jogging, weight lifting, etc, etc... activities not directly related to the discipline of Mountain climbing, however important to practice properly. 

So, in order to successfully practice Mountain climbing, one has to master specific mountain climbing techniques. But also,  in order to enhance the efficiency of these specific techniques, one needs to know and practice other techniques, not directly related to the real goal. 

And I am wondering. Are they non specific techniques we could practice to enhance our Zazen practice ?

An Eye for an Eye...

Here is a  passage from the General Introduction  to The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, edited by W.Y. Evans Wetz.

This might explain why after all these years of "An Eye for an Eye ", mankind has not progressed so much.

So long as men are held in the bondage of appearances, so long will they use such terms as moral and immoral, right and wrong, good and evil, and enact laws to preserve virtue and to destroy vice; not knowing that all sentient beings are members of one body, even as the Christian Seer St Paul perceived; and that therefore, whatever punishment be meted out to the one part cannot but affect all parts of the social organism. In this connexion the writer recalls how, when a student under the late Professor Williams James, he was taught that if even the most inconspicuous Eskimo within the Arctic Circle were to suffer pain and misfortune, it would inevitably affect, although unconsciously, every other human being on the planet. And the eminent psychologist illustrated his teaching by pointing put that if the tiniest pebble were picked up and p[aced elsewhere, event at a very short distance from its original resting place, the whole center of gravity of the Earth would be shifted.

For these reasons, none of the fully enlightened Teachers have advocated, as do the unenlightened multitude, the infliction of suffering and death upon others. Throughout uncounted milleniums, even as now, the unenlightened, the world-fettered, have maintained that this doctrine of the Enlightened Ones is impracticable, that if society is to be held together there must be the jungle law of eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Because of man's failure to rewrite his legal codes in the light of Divine Wisdom, the world today is probably more given to serious crime, particularly in the legalized form of war, than at any epoch in known history. And, notwithstanding that humanly instituted laws have failed to make man good or brotherly or wise after all these milleniums, Ignorance remains unshaken. Inevitably, as the Great Gurus teach, what men sow in law-courts or on battle-fields produces ever new harvests; and the sowing will continue until they recognize, individually and collectively, the Higher Law of the Divine At-one-ment of mankind, irrespective of nationality, race, religion, or social status, and, equally, of everything that lives.