Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. As a Chenrezig initiation approaches on Sunday, Ven Robina Courtin walks practitioners through foundational teachings for this tantric empowerment. She opens by clarifying what defines sentient beings—consciousness—then outlines the three scopes of the graduated path: avoiding lower rebirth, seeking personal liberation from saṃsāra, and developing bodhicitta to help all beings. She explains why Tantric practice requires grounding in three principles (renunciation, bodhicitta, understanding emptiness) before attempting the quicker, riskier tantric route. Much of this 64-minute session explores the guru-student relationship in Tantra: visualizing one’s teacher as a Buddha manifestation, how tantric vows relate to monastic discipline, and navigating contradictions between teachers. She concludes with practical preparation for the initiation itself. Pitched at those who have received refuge and are considering tantric practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 1998 11 13 PT.mp3
UUID: 21f30263-975e-4c1d-a7f1-58f76c586226
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Public Talks (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1998-11-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 64.4 minutes
Words: ~8,288
Does it sound very loud? I don’t really think we need it too loud, because it won’t affect the taping, will it? It’s just I want to see more of a discussion, and if I’m coming over loud, it kind of destroys the effect. Okay. You can ask questions all the way through.
Yes. If you have any questions that you’d like to start off with, you’re welcome to. Well, do any of the other experts want to say what things have been done? That’s a good point, actually, because it’s a very fundamental point that if we’re not clear about, we then we’re not clear about why we’re doing what we’re doing. There are some living beings who are not sentient beings.
Yes. Yes. Yes. It’s hard to say where it starts. Certainly, worms are sentient beings.
Generally, I just wanted to see if anybody was going to come up with the answers, but I better explain it so we’re clear. There are two kinds of living beings. There are sentient beings and Buddhas. Sentient beings means having mind. So from that point, a few Buddhas also have mind, but they’re not considered in this category because they have transcended the limitations of sentient beings.
They’re in a different class. All other beings, even arhats, even great bodhisattvas are still sentient beings until they actually attain Buddhahood. So it includes some beings who are not samsaric beings. But generally when we’re talking about sentient beings, the ones we’re really concerned with helping are the ones who are still suffering in Samsāra. Of course, if we become great bodhisattvas or become enlightened, will also be helping some of the other beings too.
We will be helping the bodhisattvas along the path. The main purpose is to help these suffering beings. So generally, when we talk about sentient beings, we’re mainly thinking about the suffering beings. But it it it isn’t just confined to those, but the actual definition. So that’s an important point.
Well, we can’t certainly it includes animals that don’t have backbones. You can’t say what size of animals is the smallest percent of these. It does seem to be possibility that there are some small creatures such as viruses, possibly bacteria that are not sentient beings. This does seem to be a distinct possibility. Certainly there are plants which are what we generally consider living beings, but from the Buddhist viewpoint, they’re not sentient beings because they don’t have consciousness.
It’s difficult to say at what stage you find forms of life that have consciousness on the animal side. And it’s quite likely that some of the more lowly forms of life don’t have consciousness, but we can’t really be sure of that because it doesn’t seem to be explicitly stated anywhere in the scriptures. So we take it for granted that worms and invisible forms of life, and I think practically anything that you can see seems to be regarded as being something that does have consciousness. And the fact that they’re very stupid doesn’t mean that they don’t have Buddha potential. They have the potential to become to be born as human beings in some future lifetime to have human type intelligence and they have Buddha potential.
So we’re still concerned with working with them, but we can’t do much for them except say a few prayers for them while they’re in that state. So looking here at the idea of taking initiation, I’m assuming that everybody who’s considering taking initiation has already been through the refuge ceremony. Is that so? I think there would be a problem there. And mean, you’re welcome to sit in on the the talk and find out what it’s all about because it’s been useless for some future time.
But I think we have to take our commitments in stages, and it would be a basic step to have taken refuge. And Rinpoche gives refuge at from time to time fairly frequently, it’s requested. And I should think that early next year it would probably be likely to be happening again that Rinpoche will be requested to give the refuge ceremony and generally when he’s requested to do that he’s also requested to give the five lay precepts so that’s a good opportunity for people who are interested in undertaking the lay precepts, either all of them or some of them, to take the lay precepts at that time. Taking this sort of commitment is really the start of your practice. And this is undertaken at the Prātimokṣa level.
That means that these things are involved with individual liberation. But it’s not necessary to have the Mahāyāna motivation to undertake these things, although it’s possible that in your mind you might be doing it with Mahāyāna motivation. It’s not enjoined on you in the ceremony at all. And these things, the taking refuge, observing moral conduct, these are really basic practice that we need to train ourselves in. We need to train ourselves in the three principles of the path which are explained in the graduated path.
And the way to do that is mainly by coming along to teachings on the graduated path, and Rinpoche is giving teachings on the graduated path. But at present, there are other teachings given on graduated path and basically all of our introductory stuff, our meditation stuff and so on, is involved with getting a grasp of the Graduated Path Basics and the basic meditation practices. And these come from what we call the Sūtra side of Buddhism, which is general Buddhism. It’s not esoteric. You it’s not there’s nothing hidden about it.
It’s all available for anybody to learn about. It’s not a heavy commitment. You can fairly weigh into it and just commit yourself as much as you want to at any given time, and then your commit can just grow deeper as you go along. You can start off with just a light sort of interest and sort of hopeful attitude, really, and then perhaps as you become a little bit more involved, you decide that it’s time to take refuge and at that stage you want to take a certain level of commitment which is just a basic level of commitment of avoiding, killing and observing respect to the Three Jewels of refuge and then training yourself in the graduated path, you learn about the three scopes. You’re all familiar with the three scopes?
So you’ve all had some graduated path training and you know about the three scopes. Yes. Right. Well, basically, the three scopes that are expanding the graduated path, the small scope is the person who’s concerned about their future rebirth. They don’t want to be born in the lower suffering realms and they look to the Three Jewels of refuge to guide them how to avoid that.
The medium scope is to do with liberation, with attaining freedom from cyclic existence for oneself, understanding that while we go from life to life, getting born again and again, under the force of deluded mental states and karma, we’re never going to be free from suffering, and even when we’re experiencing happy states, we’re never going to be really safe because we can always fall back again to the worst states. And so we really need to make an effort attachment to worldly aims and to put our energy into working to attain the liberation, state of everlasting happiness which is attained by renouncing attachment to worldly things. So this doesn’t mean that you have to give up doing all your ordinary everyday activities, but it means that we have to change our attitudes. It means that we have to place our priority on understanding the necessity of working towards cutting off the root of Samsāra, getting rid of our attachment and our other disturbing emotions, our anger and hatred and all the rest of it, and cultivating the wisdom that sees the essential nature of things. And also then we have the great scope which is concerned with the same understandings, but it’s concerned with all living beings, not just ourselves.
And we have to develop great love and compassion and the thought of working for others. If we want to work for others, then we have to check out how it can be done effectively. And by checking, we come to understand that it’s only through becoming enlightened by becoming Buddhas that we will really have the means. There’s some explanations of this in the teachings. Basically, is that if we follow the path of individual liberation, you reach liberation and become an Arahant, the Arahant enters nirvana on dying and so is only able to help a very small, a limited number of other beings because as soon as he or she passes away, they enter the state of nirvana.
They don’t get reborn again. It’s said people always bring up this point, of course, that the arhats do eventually get woken up by Buddhas, but that’s eons and eons down the track. So, to all practical purposes, can say that the arhats isn’t their help is limited, that they’re not helping others. Once they enter nirvana, they can’t communicate. Buddhas have reached a state which is much more advanced than that of the arhat.
It’s an extremely transcendental state. And so the Buddhas have this power to actually to be able to be their mind can be in nirvana and communicating with sentient beings at the same time. They can be actually deep in meditation on emptiness and at the same time going around acting on the conventional level, walking around talking and teaching and engaging in various activities. And of course they have many special powers such as being able to emanate many different forms in many different places at the same time to help sentient beings in different ways. And so we need to get these powers to be able to effectively help others.
What it means is that according to our karma, whenever our karma happens to be receptive to being helped in a particular way, the Buddhas will know that. There’ll be some Buddha somewhere who will know exactly all the Buddhas really will know what’s going on because they have this omniscient mind and there will be some Buddha somewhere who has the karmic connection with us to, at that time, manifest in some form. So if we’re receptive to receiving the teachings, then the Buddhas will manifest as teachers to show us the path. For beings who are not receptive to hearing the teachings, the most they can do is to help them to create good karma, So they will manifest in forms such as beggars to enable the sentient beings to take up an opportunity to to create some sort of good karma such as generosity. The Buddhas are always working in that way.
They’re always watching out for every single sentient thing and helping them with this skillful means. And that’s what symbolized by the Thousand Arms of Chenrezig. So that’s the background and we need to train ourselves in these three principles of the path which is basically renunciation, bodhicitta and understanding of emptiness. Now we don’t have to have a deep understanding of these things in order to take some of these initiations such as the Chenrezig initiation. But we do need to have a general idea of what they’re about, of what we’re trying to attain.
Otherwise, it would be meaningless. Because the reason why we’re taking this initiation is to enable us to gain higher realizations, and that has to be based on a sūtra understanding. So Tantra and Sūtra are not two things that we want to keep separate. In this tradition, Tantra is practiced, but it can’t be practiced without firm basis of Sūtra. It’s the Sūtra understanding that gives us the solidity to our Tantric practice so that we can carry it out fruitfully.
And so we need to have that firm grounding on the basic basic things like observing karma, observing moral discipline, developing love and compassion, developing renunciation of Samsāra, and then we can engage in Tantric practice. That’s why I said we need to have an understanding, at least some knowledge of the three principles of the path which is renunciation, bodhicitta and absolute truth. So don’t worry if you don’t know very much about these things because you can study them afterwards, but you just have to have that general idea. And that’s why when the Lamas give these great initiations that they teach the graduated path beforehand. When His Holiness gives the Kālacakra initiation, he teaches graduated path for three days beforehand and then he gives the initiation.
And so this is because a lot of the people in Tibet perhaps might not have had these teachings. So for us, we have the opportunity of coming along here to receive the teachings, and we can also study the books and so on. So it’s explained in things like this prayer of the as a graduated path, The one that we often recite. Do you know what page it’s on? I think it’s page twenty one.
Yes. No, that’s not it. Twenty. Yeah. No.
Oh, sorry. I’ve got the wrong Yes. Yes, it is page twenty. So it it takes us through the three scopes. It starts off with devotion to the master, reflecting on the precious human rebirth, on impermanence and death, and the necessity of following pure action observing karma, understanding that the after death it says that our will follow us like a shadow our white and black actions follow us a shadow follows the body.
And so we then get up to this first. Let me understand the thoughts of samsaric perfection. To taste, it cannot satisfy. It is the door of all suffering. It cannot be trusted.
Let striving for the bliss of freedom grow strongly within me. So that’s the medium scope, the sort of attaining liberation. And that is what is called renunciation. When we talk about renunciation, we’re talking about this renunciation of attachment to the good things of cyclic existence. In other words, just placing the mind on the attainment of of liberation.
And then it goes on to bodhicitta, which is the other one of the other three principles with the greatest sorry. Let me say that just as I have fallen into the sea of Samsāra, so have all mother migrators. And they are training the supreme bodhicitta, which bears the burden of freeing migrators. And so that’s the motivation that we have to have in order to enter Tantra. It’s not enough to have thought of individual liberation.
Tantra has nothing to do with the practice for individual liberation. It’s only for Mahāyāna practice. That doesn’t mean that all Mahāyāna practitioners practice Tantra, but Tantra is the quick way to attain enlightenment. Without Tantra, it takes countless great eons to attain enlightenment many, many, many lives. With Tantra, it’s possible to attain enlightenment even in this lifetime.
Perhaps most of us won’t attain it just in this lifetime, but we can hope that we can attain it in a very few lifetimes. And so it’s a very fast practice. There are some features of Tantric practice which make it bring the result very, very quickly. So then it goes on saying, by when trained in the common path, I’m a suitable vessel. Let me enter with ease that noble entrance for fortunate beings, the Vajra vehicle, the highest of all vehicles.
That’s referring to the yeah, the Tantric path. And it also mentions Sorry, in the previous verse, sorry, I missed something there. So going back to the previous verse, it mentions the path uniting calm abiding and insight. And that is the third principle of the path, the understanding of emptiness. And then having gained those three principles of the path, then entering the Adamantine vehicle, is referring to Tantra.
So, there’s a lot of things that can be said about the Tantra path. A quick path. It also presents certain dangers to the person. Because in the Tantric path we actually place more emphasis on the mind rather than on following strict rules all the time, but it’s necessary to have this grounding of the rules. We have to have a firm understanding of the basic teachings.
We need to have this really strong training in moral conduct. We need to really have a love and appreciation of the vows of moral conduct. And it’s said that having the vows of moral conduct is a necessary basis for your tantric practice. And so it’s not to think that it’s that by entering into Tantric practice, you can do away with the moral conduct. But there are certain instances when you’re practicing Tantra that that you would have to let your Tantric requirements override some of the the less you know, the less how to say it?
The lesser vows of moral conduct perhaps. So, for example, a very good example of this was the other night when we had taken the Mahāyāna Precepts, which isn’t exactly a Prātimokṣa practice, but it’s similar. For the monks and nuns, we actually have a vow not to take alcohol. And when we do our Guru Puja, on the certain dates that we have a commitment to do this practice for, or even when we do it at other times, then we’re required to actually taste the wine. There’s two substances that get handed around.
And also, the other day we’d taken barrels not to eat after lunchtime, we had to at least just taste the food even though we just touched it with our finger finger in our mouth. We did have to do that. And so And we had to taste the wine. And this is because it is a commitment for certain For people who have taken certain Tantric initiations. It won’t be that won’t be involved with the Chenrezig initiation, but this is just an example.
But there are certain things certain instances where your tantric practices or commitments will override certain pratimoksha things. And you have to have the greatest respect for your things and not think that this means that if you’re practicing Tantra that the Prātimokṣa disciplines are unimportant. In fact, they’re very important and they’re the basis for success in Tantric practice. This is what Atisha taught to Tibetans when he came to Tibet. He he saw that that Tibetans were very confused on his issue, and he he taught in this way to help them to clear up their confusion.
So we have to have Mayana motivation. We have to have a very earnest desire to attain enlightenment quickly so as to benefit sentient beings. So we have to have this attitude of putting liberation of sentient beings before ourselves so that we’re prepared to run this risk that’s involved in undertaking Tantric initiation. The fact that if we do go off the path then we could run into danger. And With the Sūtra path, it’s very safe.
If you follow the Sūtra path, you really can’t go wrong. It’s just straightforward. You just keep on going the way it says. In Tantra, you often have to use your judgment. You have to make decisions.
It’s often not so clear And it’s possible that if people get caught up in ego, if they disobey their Lamas, if they don’t respect their Lamas correctly, then they can go off the path and fall into quite mistaken actions and create a lot of bad karma. So it’s said that you’re actually undertaking a risk and you have to be prepared to take that risk. At the same time, we don’t want to discourage you because it is a very powerful way to practice. And it’s said that it’s better to go into Tantric practice because as long as you don’t actually break your respect for your Guru, for your Lama, but if you break your other Tantric bells and so on and go to the the hell states, even say you’ll come out very, very quickly and have a rebirth as a Tantric practitioner and get enlightened very quickly, and it’s much faster even so than going along the Sūtra path. Guess you know, I was one time very depressed because I’d unintentionally broken some of my Tantric commitments, I was very depressed about this because I’d only just taken them and I expected myself to be perfect.
And Geshe Dhawa was giving us a teaching on this and he said, another thing is that when you’re in the hells, you can push the other hell beings around and say, I’m better than you are. Because we’ve been to the hells countless times before anyway for bad purposes. So now, at least, we’re going there for a good purpose. But not to worry about that because really, if you have trust in your teacher, and if you do your best earnestly to follow the commitments, then even though it’s impossible to really avoid making some mistakes, we can purify them and restore our samayas, our word of honor, and keep on going ahead. So this is not something to be worried There are techniques built into the practice for dealing with this situation.
And Yes. So that, anyway, this brings up Sorry. Yes. In the Guru Puja, it means that nothing has true existence. This is not saying they don’t exist.
This is what we’re talking about when we talk about the Absolute Truth, the Truth of Emptiness. It’s a very subtle point. We need to understand it in order to gain liberation, in order to gain enlightenment. It’s one of those three principles of the path I was just referring to. nirvana is basically it, but what we want to do is achieve the state where we can be both in nirvana and not stuck in it.
Whereas the arhats are stuck in it. Buddhas, their minds are in nirvana. Are basically in nirvana. nirvana really, in a sense, it’s not a place, of course, it’s a state of mind. The arhat It’s said that the arhat enters nirvana when they die, but essentially they attain liberation at the time when they cut off the root of saṃsāra and attain true cessation of all the distorted mental states, and free themselves from bondage to the distorted mental states and karma.
When they’ve removed all the karmic imprints and the distorted mental states, they’re liberated. And then it’s said that they enter nirvana when they die, but I think in a sense that’s just using language. But in another sense also, An arhat, any being except the Buddha has to go through this sort of in and out process of meditation on emptiness. Even in our heart, before they die, while they’re still alive in their body, they still have some subtle dual view when they’re out of their meditative equipoise. They know that it’s just an illusion.
They’re not taken in by it, but it still appears to them. So they do have this It’s only when they’re in deep meditative equipoise, on emptiness, nothing of the conventional level appears to them, that they’re actually in this state of being free from duality, but it manifests again when they come out of that meditation. For a Buddha, there is no thing as any dualistic view. They observe conventional reality and they observe ultimate reality, but there is no appearance of true existence in any of this. The appearance of true existence is something which is false.
So we have to understand this is technical terminology, and it’s quite confusing until you understand what it means. When we’re talking about there is not an action of true existence, we’re talking about something which appears as existing from its own side, self established, independent, not depending on anything else. And this is what’s meant by true existence. So things do exist. We have this instinctive feeling that they exist independently, which is what causes all our problems.
But when we have this deeper insight, we’ll understand that everything exists dependent on other phenomena, and there is nothing that exists independently, and that everything exists everything that does exist conventionally and ultimately exists without any trace of true existence. Understanding what true existence means in this particular sense. So it it’s not refuting existence. It’s a certain conventional existence. So anyway, that that’s a difficult topic, but that’s just a bit of an idea of what it’s all about.
So I was going to go on and say something about the relationship to the teacher. When we take initiation, initiation, we have to be committing ourselves to the Mahāyāna path. From this stage onwards, there’s no going backwards. We’re committed to the Mahāyāna path and we’re committed to doing this kind of following this sort of tantric approach to enlightenment and we’re committed to a particular relationship with the initiating master whom we receive initiation from. So in tantra, in sūtra teachings, have to have great respect for the teacher, teacher but we’re not required to see the teacher as anything else but a human being, a human being with qualities that we find very admirable.
But we don’t have to see our teacher as being a Buddha. But in Tantra we need to practice seeing our teacher as being a Buddha. And, of course, this isn’t something that’s necessarily easy for us. Sometimes we can see that a teacher like Khensur Rinpoche, sometimes you get a flash that, oh, he’s just like a Buddha, but then at other times you’ll see him as having perhaps various, what appear to be faults, perhaps fragilities and so on. You’ll see that he can’t speak English and so on.
You can say, Well, if he has omniscient mind, how is it that he can’t speak English? Except to say, no, good. Something like that, you know. Thank you. Well, maybe they can.
I don’t know about extraterrestrials. The the point is that we’re we’re not worried about extraterrestrials, but we’re worried about we’re concerned about Khensur Rinpoche who’s going to give us this initiation, and we have to see Khensur Rinpoche as being an emanation of Buddha. And, basically, the reason why we can’t see Khensur Rinpoche and other teachers in the aspect of Nirmānakāya Buddha such as Śākyamūni Buddha with the all the marks and signs such as the uṣṇīṣa on top of the head and the little curl between the eyebrows and the webs of light between the fingers and the rays of light emanating from the body and all this kind of thing, you know, marks on the hands, all the rest of it. It’s because our karma is not ripe for us to see. We don’t have the karma for that.
When we have a greater accumulation of merit, we’ll be able to look at our Gurus and actually see them in that aspect. And it’s in actual fact, there were people who couldn’t see Buddha as being anything special when he was on the earth. So there were a lot of people who thought he was just a nuisance. And so, in the same way, we see Khensur Rinpoche and we see he’s a lovely, elderly Tibetan gentleman, but we don’t see him as being we can’t really see him as being a Buddha. But we have to start practicing this way and there are some practices we do and in fact when we do these kinds of practices with deities such as Chenrezig, we actually visualize that Chenrezig is not just Chenrezig, the embodiment of the compassion of all the Buddhas, but is also a manifestation of our Guru.
Or if we have more than one Guru, then Chenrezig is the manifestation of all our Gurus rolled into one. In Tantra, we start thinking about some things that don’t quite fit our ordinary way of thinking. So we might think that if we have two or three Gurus, that these are separate people and they can all be rolled into one. But essentially, if they’re Buddha, if they’re emanations of Buddha, then they are essentially emanations of the one energy. And even though there are countless Buddhas, they’re all working for sentient beings in the same way.
Their wishes, their aspirations are all the same. Their work is the same. And so we can think of our teacher of the deity we’re meditating on as being the emanation of all our teachers. We shouldn’t think that there’s a contradiction between our different teachers. This is a difficult thing.
If you have several teachers, it’s one of the things that’s difficult about Tantric practice and it’s one of the reasons why it’s possible to make bad karma, because your teachers might tell you different things. Might like one you know, one teacher might seem better tempered and sweeter, and the other one might seem bad tempered and difficult and so on. It could be easy to start criticizing and saying, look, like this teacher, but that teacher is no good. He’s got a bad temper. Or things like this, you know, he’s angry.
If we say things like this, This is negative. This is criticizing the teacher. We have to say things Of course, you know, if the teacher scolds you, you can say he’s showing the aspect of being wrathful. But Yes? Yes.
From the Tantric viewpoint, he attained enlightenment before he was born in this world. He didn’t actually attain he didn’t actually find the teachings existing from the living teachers of his time. He did go to living teachers before he showed the aspect of attaining enlightenment, but according to the Mahāyāna teachings and Tantra teachings, he had actually attained enlightenment in Akanishtha heaven, Akanishtha Pure Land, which is a very special Pure Land where the you find only only very high bodhisattvas sorry and the very high bodhisattvas attain full Buddhahood there and are able to then manifest in aspects to in different worlds. Yes. So he would’ve yes.
Yes. So he actually received teachings from other Buddhas. I’m not sure. So somebody might have actually heard this story. I’m not too sure.
I’m bit vague about the details myself, but certainly it’s actually said that Maitreya Buddha was one of his teachers and that actually Śākyamūni Buddha attained enlightenment before Maitreya. But at one stage when they were both bodhisattvas, the Śākyamūni Buddha received teachings from Maitreya and then he actually did something I think it was when he gave his body to the to the cannibal demons. He accumulated so much merit from that that he attained enlightenment quicker, something like that. Do you know? Perhaps he did.
Anyway, certainly, Maitreya showed the aspect of being Śākyamūni Buddha’s disciple when when Śākyamūni Buddha was teaching him Maitreya was one of the eight great bodhisattvas who was in his entourage. But anyway, I’m not too clear about these stories, the point is that the Buddhas did attain enlightenment through following the Guru. And everybody had a guru or gurus. Then you would think that he was showing the aspect of being crazy so that you could have the opportunity to practice stopping him from doing that or something. I mean, yes, sometimes there are times when you have to treat your guru.
The point is to be very, very careful before you take the step. Be very, very careful. It’s explaining you should actually read what it says in in the graduated path, in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. It has explanations on this topic. There are also other texts that have an explanation.
There are qualities we should look for in a teacher. Actually, if somebody would like to jump up and go and get the book out of the library I think I’ve got the keys here or Becky. Here. Yes. It might be interesting to actually look that up.
There are some points that we have to have. In particular, we should look for a teacher who is a a follower of the Vinaya, who has tamed his mind through the practice of moral discipline. That’s one of the important points. There have been some great teachers who showed the aspect of being crazy yogis who didn’t pay so much attention to the aspect of moral discipline, but unless we’re capable of appreciating their qualities, then it’s better for us. We should be more careful to have a teacher who does show this aspect of having pure moral discipline.
That’s very important. Also, look for compassion, concern for the students, having overcome ego. Thanks. Sorry. I’m in the wrong place.
Yes. It’s about yourself as a spiritual guide. Actually, Rinpoche is going to be getting onto this topic shortly. But that will probably be after we’ve taken the initiation. Mhmm.
What did he say to you? Did he talk about this he did, didn’t he? Yes. Talked about what we should be looking for in the spiritual guide. That is sort a spiritual guide.
There’s such so much in here that That’s right. I wish I’d actually, I should have brought that in with me. I have my notes on that. Yes. Yes.
That’s right. Of course, it’s very hard to check out a lot of these things, but You know that Khensur Rinpoche has been the abbot of the monastic college, so he certainly has the knowledge. The summer yes. Does that have checking. That has had to devote itself to the groom.
That’s all about oh, dear. Well, look. I think maybe you guys have a look at that. And I think it’s in there somewhere. Well, the ten quality deals or something about the quality we have to look for.
But, anyway, I think that yes. Yes, I think the point is to understand that we have to look for a teacher who has perfect qualities, if possible, at least, yeah, who has the learning, who has the understanding, somebody that we feel that we can trust in terms of moral discipline, of kindness, compassion, good heart, somebody who one of the qualities that he should have more more concern for the for the disciple than himself, that he’s not doing it on some sort of an ego trip for for his own benefit. Want you to leave yourself Yes. Yourself to life. Yes.
That you can do obviously to check them out and go to the background. There’s nothing to stop someone sort of living out after a couple of years, you know, like a future going bananas. So, basically, if you really do get a teacher who’s on a high level, they won’t go bananas. But they they can sometimes Seems like that. Sometimes sometimes you you you do have difficulty in I mean, sometimes you do see faults in the teacher.
Yeah. And you’re not necessarily required to do everything the teacher tells you to if that’s something that seems wrong. You can always you know, you should respect what the teacher says to you, but you can say, oh, look, I have a problem with You can say you can always sort of negotiate with the teacher so you don’t just have to blindly obey everything. It can be quite difficult sometimes with the teachers telling you aspect of human frailty. A few years ago, it was very illuminated after having sort of been filled up with these teachings of how the the guru is the emanation of Buddha and his perfect omniscient and so on.
And then to be helping Sangye Khadro making preparations for Lama Yeshe and just going around and saying, how are we going to stop Lama Yeshe from wanting to drive cars? Because he’ll kill himself, you know, if we let him drive. And she it was true, you know, you just couldn’t let Lama Yeshe in a car. You had to find some way of tactfully keeping him out of a car. And in a way, that was a sort of a teaching for us too because he must have known that all this was going on.
And, you know, in a in a sense, probably, he in a sense, probably, he knew just what he was doing when he got into car and drove in this crazy dangerous sort of a manner. But also, he was sort of perhaps put it in the situation where we had to show our devotion for him by stopping him stopping him doing it. So He did have some driving lessons. Yes. Well, he he did have some driving lessons, but then he’d wanted to get into the car and drive, and he there’s just no way that he was, you know, that that anybody could feel feel that it was right to let him drive the car.
Yes. And particularly, if was out in the country, he’d want to get in the car and drive by himself. And he he just, you know, just by ordinary standards, you know, out of respect for your Guru’s life and limb, you just couldn’t let him do it. And in fact, eventually, he did drive a car and turn it over, and I think after that, he was a bit more open to the suggestion that maybe he maybe he shouldn’t drive like that. Maybe he shouldn’t drive at all.
Yeah. It’s funny things. Sometimes sometimes, you know, like these things like clumsy issues. I just have so much self confidence. But yes.
Oh, you’ve done it good. Right. And Yes. Well well, I think but I think they just have have had infinite patience. You want you want you wanna sort of see some some fold in it.
Oh, yes. Well, that’s I you can do that. Yeah. You’re wanting him to take sort of this for kicking you instead of sort of yeah. But I mean, maybe basically what you need to do is sort of internally you’re kicking yourself.
Yeah. So you you need to stop doing that and see that you actually have this broader potential. Yeah. I I think I know what you mean that you start when you sit when you hear I’m in teaching, you start to see all your thoughts. And I was over in the chair said that this is good, you know, that when we listen to graduated path, it be like somebody sticking a knife into us, which it is sometimes.
When you really pay attention. You start thinking, oh, you know, I thought I was practicing, and now, oh, boy. So this is good acting. This is a good sign. As long as we don’t get depressed, you know, I think we don’t make you make it make as long as it doesn’t make you feel hopeless.
So because the other side is that we have good potential, and all these beings were like us at one time. So, anyway, the initiation we’re going to be taking is there’s two kinds of initiation. There’s wangs and there’s zhenangs. The permission initiation is going to be a zhenang. And that’s a fairly simple kind of initiation.
So it probably it won’t take terribly long, and it will probably be with a torma, which is a sort of cake. Not all do that with tormas, but generally they are. So we’ll be visualizing Chenrezig sort of being manifested in this cake. So you might have heard something about these wangs which are quite very elaborate kinds of initiations. So the initiation we’re taking might be like one of those elaborate ones.
And I think it’s from the Kriyā level of Tantra. I didn’t actually check on that, but generally when lamas give this kind of initiation for us, they specify if it was from the higher level. So I think we can assume that it’s from the Kriyā level. So there’s four levels of Tantra and the the complexity there’s a lot of distinguishing factors between the different levels of Tantra. The complexity is one of them.
Another thing is that probably with the initiation that we’re going to take, it we might we won’t be having to take the tantric vows. So definitely, we’re not going to have to take the tantric vows. If you’ve heard about the tantric vows, you don’t have to worry about that. So, actually, that’s one of the things that’s a lot more elaborate and a lot more difficult to keep, and you won’t be having to do the six session yoga. It could well involve taking the Bodhisattva vows.
We tried to check on this, but Khensur Rinpoche says that basically you have to come along to the initiation with the attitude that you’re going to do whatever the initiating master tells you to do. And so he’s not being specific about what commitments of practice we’ll have to take and about what level of Bodhisattva vows we’ll be taking. There probably will be some sort of commitment such as having to do a round of one mala of mantras every day. It won’t be a heavy commitment. It won’t be something that’s going to take a lot of time, but it could be on a daily basis.
So you have to be prepared for that. There are two levels of body there’s the wishing and the engaging level. Sometimes the lamas only make it compulsory to take the wishing level, and it’s optional to take the engaging level. Sometimes it’s compulsory to take both levels. We don’t know what it’s going to be, so you have to be prepared to take the engaging level of the Bodhisattva vows, if necessary.
It’s probably better we don’t tell you what the Bodhisattva vows are until you get there either. Generally with these things you have to take them first and find out what they are afterwards. That’s think mainly because the idea is that people who haven’t taken these vows are not supposed to be checking up on the people who have taken them. It’s impossible to keep the Bodhisattva vows perfectly, but they’re means of purifying them. So this is something that, again, we have means.
We we don’t want to be too depressed about it or too worried about it because we make if we make an earnest effort to keep them as well as we can, then we have the means to purify. Does anybody have any other questions you want to ask? I think that was a mistake. I think, basically, Rinpoche was saying that I think, basically, it’s better if we don’t take that attitude. Rinpoche was I think Tony rang up and tried to get a an expression on that point that it wasn’t understood by the Japanese nun exactly what he that he was asking about that point.
And Tony I I I think it’s a pity that I asked that I that I let Tony do it because I was busy because he didn’t quite understand the point I was driving at either, or he didn’t express it clearly enough to Drupön Rinpoche. Drupön Rinpoche didn’t get the point, so the point didn’t get across to Rinpoche. And the answer that came back was not as clear as it should have been. So I think, basically, although Rinpoche did say there could be some exceptions, he was basically saying that we should go in with the attitude that we’re going to be ready to accept the commitments that the initiated initiating master gives us. And that, basically, if we’re not ready to do that, then we really don’t need to be there anyway.
So he was sort of saying that there can be some circumstances when he’s holding the Lamrim or sometimes gives initiations. He sometimes sees that people, they wouldn’t be able to keep some of the very lengthy commitments that are sometimes given at some of these initiations. And sometimes his holiness then sort of gives people a loophole so that they can receive the the blessing of the empowerment without the the full commitment. But they still have to have the the full faith and my motivation and so on. Faith in the teachings, faith in the practice.
So if we haven’t got if we’ve got these things, basically, we should be able to take the sort of commitments that Rinpoche will be giving on Sunday. And if we haven’t got that sort of do we’re able able do that. To do absolutely no compulsion to undertake tantric initiation. It’s very much a thing that you have to wish to do from your heart, from your side. You shouldn’t rush into it.
You should think about it very carefully. It is a wonderful wonderful opportunity, but you shouldn’t think that you have to do it now because you’ll never be able to do it again. There will be other occasions in the future when initiations will be given. You also have to look at whether you feel ready to engage in this sort of practice with the spiritual master who’s given the initiation. The practice also of Chenrezig, of course, is concerned with developing compassion, so it’s very helpful for us.
And the reason why we requested this practice is because we’re already doing it here. So we thought it’s good if people who are doing this practice regularly have the opportunity of doing the practice of self generation. When you receive the tantric empowerment, then you actually practice visualizing yourself as and engaging in the actions of enlightened being. In this sense, in the meditation, you can visualize yourself sending out light rays to enlighten the other sentient beings and doing other practices which enable us to accumulate a vast accumulation of merit very, very quickly. This is why Tantric practice enables us to attain enlightenment very, very swiftly.
One of the reasons is that it enables us to accumulate this vast accumulation of merit very, very quickly, which would otherwise take eons. So I think that’s about all I have to say really about the practice. There’s some books that might be helpful. One is this one, Introduction to Tantra by Lama Yeshe, is very good to read to get a feeling for what Tantra practice is all about. It’s not too technical.
There’s this little booklet which I very naughtily copied in breach of copyright, but I don’t think the book’s available anymore. And it’s called on receiving initiation into the vajrayana path. It’s it’s talking about initiations in general. A lot quite a lot of the detail in here has to do with taking the Maha Anuttarayoga initiations, which are ones, but the big ones where you enter the mandala. But, anyway, you would find quite a lot of information here, and it’s very, very helpful about the the things that you need to understand, the practices that you need to do, and so on.
It’s a very good introduction to taking an initiation. So I’ve only got three copies here, but maybe if I well, maybe if feel like you’d like to buy one of these copies, you can stick up your hand and look there. I actually left one in the office. So there are other copies around that you could read. If it does anybody feel they want to get hold of this one?
One, two, three. Okay. Well, that’s three people. So if anybody else wants them, I can make some more copies another time, but we haven’t got much time. Yes.
So I was thinking that I could actually leave a copy somewhere and you could look at it if you’re going to be around the house. Where would be a good place to leave it? In the library, I suppose. And, of course, we have this book in the library and in the bookshop. It’s a lovely book.
Beautiful. So I think that’s about it. That way we dedicate our notes and finish. So on Sunday, we’ll have to skip the Chenrezig meditation. We’ll do it in another room, and will be in here doing his preparations.
And then he’ll stay in here. And when the time is for us to come in, we’ll just come in and we’ll have to rinse our mouth out with water and spit the water. I guess we’ll have to have a bucket or something or perhaps it’ll be outside in the garden. So, anyway, you rinse your mouth and spit to purify your mouth. For this kind of practice, particularly for Kriyā practice, it’s very important to consider externals.
So we should wash ourselves. We should be clean and wear clean clothes. And it’s probably a good idea if we don’t eat meat that day. Certainly, when we’re doing practice doing Kriyā practice, we don’t eat meat that day if we’re doing a retreat. I don’t think it’s required when we take the initiation, but it’s just a suggestion.
And all of these things are part of the preparations. And when we come in, we wash our mouths and sit down very quietly and respectfully, make prostrations. We should immediately come in, think, visualize that Khensur Rinpoche is Chenrezig. So we should see Chenrezig sitting on the throne, and then we’ll be told what to do after that. If I’ve if I’ve forgotten anything that should be mentioned, maybe somebody else might remember some of these points.
But I think that’s that’s the most important things. Thanks.