Lillian Too - The Buddha Book: Buddhas, blessings, prayers, and rituals to grant you love, wisdom, and healing

Spiritual means the mind, and spiritual people are those who seek its nature. Through this they come to understand the effects of their behavior, the actions of their body, speech, and mind. Morality is the wisdom that understands the nature of the mind.

When you know the nature of your own mind, depression is spontaneously dispelled. Whatever pain, pleasure, or other feeling you experience, it is all an expression of your mind. When you discover that true satisfaction comes only from the mind, you realize you can extend this experience without limit, and then it is possible to discover everlasting happiness so it is actually very simple.

LAMA YESHE

Life is
like a flickering flame:
a phenomenon that
cannot last long.
Like an illusion:
appearing real
but not there
being empty.

Phenomena are
like dewdrops
or water bubbles
that can perish any time.

Being transitory in nature
like a dream
they appear real
from their own side,
yet they are empty from
their own side.

Like a dream
exactly like that.
Total hallucination
Like lightning,
transitory in nature.
When there is lightning
a flash of light appears
and then it is gone.

Same:
When death comes
all appearance of this life
go,
like friends who were here
then pass away
and are gone.

Buddha said:
If we cling, if we grasp
there is suffering.
Things cannot last;
they are impermanent by
nature.
Holding the view of
permanence
only leads to suffering.
It creates the cause to
reincarnate in samsara
again.

Attachment ties us to
samsara again.

From Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoches teaching on Impermanence, given at Losang Drakpa Buddhist Meditation Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on February 2 2002.

My Personal Journey into Bliss

M y journey began in the holy city of Bodhgaya, in India. Several years ago, in February 1997, I had the great good fortune to meet one of the most amazing beings of our time, someone whom I unexpectedly recognized. This strange sensation of dj vu hit me at the moment when his palms pressed against the sides of my head as I bowed instinctively and presented him with the symbolic offering of a silk scarf. This gesture and ritual are very much a part of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition each time one meets a recognized high lama (guru).

The sensation of remembering happened at some uncanny, experiential level. One moment I was curiously anticipating meeting a holy man, and the next this almost blissful sense of recognition came over me. I felt drawn to him as if he were someone I had known and loved for a very long time. The feeling was momentary like a television channel flickering for an instant before switching back to the mundane world where I was being introduced to Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche.

In this life, that was our first meeting. He was smiling in no special way; he did not pick me out for special attention. I was one in a long line of people waiting to offer a kata, the traditional silk scarf. But as Rinpoches disciples and followers knelt and prostrated all around me in reverence to him, I recall thinking, What took him so long to find me?

Since then I have embraced Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche as my spiritual guide and teacher. It was a meeting I should have anticipated, but when you really do not know anything about lamas and past lives, this is not something you could realize.

There had been many signs, but I was blind to them. Most telling had been my dreams, of which the most significant was one of two white tigers, which I later discovered were in fact snow lions. These heralded the appearance of the guru into my life, although I was unaware of this. Then there had been the continuous mental images that came to me images of some distant time, up in the Himalayan mountain range and on the stone-cold floor of a monastery. Later I would understand them to be flashes of memory, but when they first came into my consciousness they meant nothing to me. It was only when I saw pictures and actually went to the Solu Khumbu region in the Himalayas that I recognized the place. Those revelations blew my mind, but even then I bent over backward not to reach out. I kept dismissing the coincidences as fancy imagination on my part until I met Rinpoche, and felt the momentous impact of that up-close moment.

For a year after that personally historic meeting, I flew around the world chasing Buddhas I went from India to Taiwan to the United States, and eventually to Kathmandu and the Himalayas, to the high mountains of the Solu Khumbu region and a village called Lawudo. I am now convinced that in a past life I lived there with Rinpoche at a time when he was the Lawudo Lama, a living Buddha who manifested as a meditator-teacher living in retreat in a cave in the high mountains. Few knew him for what he really was, until the time came for his passing on.

Only at his death did the Lawudo lama reveal the enlightened mind that had resided in his enlightened body. For twelve days and nights the signs appeared rainbow clouds, blue skies, and the sounds of angels singing. After he had been cremated, nothing of the bones of his holy body remained among the ashes, save a precious jewel. This sparkling jewel was subsequently returned to his family and then the people of that region came to regard the Lawudo lama as an enlightened being. But there was much more to his kindness, for the stunning sequel of that magnificently divine passing was his reincarnation: the Lawudo lama came back.

He reincarnated into the body of the young Zopa Rinpoche, and from the moment he could talk he made known who he was, persistently pointing to the old Lawudo lamas cave and insisting that was his cave. Buddhists know that divine happenings always occur as if they are common-day occurrences, with little excitement and no fanfare. That is how it happened with the Lawudo lamas reappearance in the human realm but, instead of coming back as a meditator living in a remote cave, this time he took the form of a humble monk. He easily passed all the tests that eventually led to his recognition and enthronement as the reincarnation of the Lawudo Lama. As a young tulku (reincarnate lama), Rinpoche spent some years in Tibet getting a monastic education, before being forced to flee to India when the Chinese invaded in 1959.

For years I had known that in a past life I lived in a cave overlooking a valley cultivated with bright-green plants (which I later discovered were potato plants), while in the distance there were high, snow-capped mountains. I knew that my significant past lives had to have been lived somewhere amid such peaks, for I have always loved mountains. For a long time I assumed that the picture in my mind was somewhere in China. It was only after I went to Lawudo that I realized that it was a vision of somewhere high up in the Himalayas.

Meeting Rinpoche made everything I had ever been and done take on a new perspective. I had retired from corporate life in the early 1990s, after reaching some exalted heights. No one believed I could make myself get off the roller-coaster life I had carved out in the rich and glamorous world of business.

I told skeptical friends I had other mountains to climb. I had no idea what lay ahead, but had retired to become a full-time mother. It seemed absurd, after praying so hard and taking a decade to produce a child, to turn away from the joys of mothering Jennifer in favor of chasing the corporate dream. So I cashed in my investments, made myself redundant, packed my bags, said goodbye to Hong Kong, and went home to Malaysia. I devoted the next few years exclusively to Jennifer it was a special time for us both and one we will never forget. In those few years Jennifer blossomed, and between us was born a mother-daughter love that today transcends our hearts and minds. But we are two individuals. And while my life is entering its waning phase, hers is just beginning. As Jennifers life takes on new colors and flavors, it makes me realize that I cannot live my life exclusively around hers. If I truly wish her to fly, I must let go.