Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand: Day 1

I started to read the book that was edited by Trijang Rinpoche and translated by Michael Richards that is based on a teaching by Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche. I am going to share what I learned from the first chapter of the book today. That chapter is Day 1 of Pabongka Rinpoche's teachings.

Day 1 is an introductory discourse on the Lam Rim. Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche gave this teaching as a motivational teaching for the teachings that would be coming in the following days.

Pabongka Rinpoche began with a lovely prayer from Lama Tsongkhapa.

This opportune physical form
Is worth more than a wish-granting gem.
You only gain its like once.
So hard to get, so easily destroyed,
It's like a lightning blot in the sky.

Contemplate this, and you will realize
All worldly actions are but a winnowed chaff,
And night and day you must
Extract some essence from your life.
I, the yogi, practiced this way;
You, wanting liberation, do the same.

I think that this prayer is telling us that our human form is something that is extremely hard to achieve. It is so hard to get. Having a human life with all the opportune conditions to practice the Dharma is really hard as it is as hard as a Blind turtle navigating in an ocean and surfaces every one millennium and it so happens to be able to surface in a golden yoke. The golden yoke is the Dharma. The ocean is the Ocean of Samsara - which is the cycle of birth and death and suffering.

It is so easily destroyed. Human life can be so easily ended. Like if someone jumps of a five-floor building, their life is lost. They get an incurable disease, another life is lost. Humans are really frail creatures.

All worldly actions are like a winnowed chaff means that all our worldly actions will all just be like the useless part of the plant when we harvest wheat grains which are thrown away. Totally worthless.

Since we have been born and reborn since beginningless time till now, there has not ever been a suffering that we have not endured. Nothing we have ever not experienced before. We would be just experiencing the same sufferings over and over again nor that there is no happiness that we have not enjoyed before. However, even with all the things we had in our past lives, we have never done anything worthwhile from them.

We now have this human form. We should do something to derive some essence from it.

If we do not examine this life, we would be more happier finding a few coins than feeling joy over this current rebirth. We will not feel sad if we wasted this life, we will be sadder when losing some money.

If you were to clean a wish granting gem by cleaning washing it three times and polishing it three times, then, offering it up to a Victory Banner, you may get all the goods things in life but they cannot be used to prevent a rebirth in the lower realms.

If you want to go into a nice rebirth in your future lives, you can create the causes to do so by using your current physical form.

We are all sure to die and we cannot ever be certain when we will die. You could not be even sure you would be alive the same time as today next year, maybe you would even already have become a shaggy, furry animal with horns. Or you might become a hungry ghost, unable to find food and water.

Your mind does not die after your death. It continues. It continues into to migrations that is the upper and lower realms. If you are born in the Hell Without Respite, you will have to endure becoming like the hellfire and be consumed. Or if you are born in the Hell of Continual Resurrection where you die and get revived and die again. That is very scary. And do our sufferings ease after a while? The answer is NO!

We might think that the lower realms are far away but the distance between you and the lower realms is only the fact that you can still draw breath.

As long as we remain uncritical, we never suspect that we are going to the lower realms. We most probably think that if we more or less keep our vows, perform most of our daily recitations, and have not committed any serious sin, such as killing a person and running off with his horse, we will not go to the three lower realms. The trouble is we have not looked into things properly. We should think it over in detail; then we would see that we are not free to choose whether or not we go to the lower realms or not. This is determined by our Karma (please see the chart below by H.E. Tsem Tulku Rinpoche, the chart summarizes the whole Lam Rim).



I feel that we might never think that we will never ever go into the lower realms if we do all our practices. That is not entirely true as we do not have the ability to control what realm we will go in during our future lifetimes as our karma decides for us. When we do not do anything wrong in our life, like hurting others or killing others, we would be more or less on the path of neutral karma. Look at where the orange line (neutral Karma) leads to. It still leads to Samsara. This is a really good chart as it really summarizes everything that we need to know. Rinpoche once said that even when we sit down and watch TV we would be accumulating neutral Karma as we would be wasting our precious human life.

We have a mixture a good and bad Karma in our mindstream. We have a mixture of these two that is triggered when we die. It is triggered by our cravings and clinging.

We might feel that our virtue is strong but in truth, it is very weak.

We must be kind to all as all sentient beings have been our parents in our past lives. The best way to repay all their kindness is to cause them to have every happiness and to be without every kind of suffering.

With these thoughts, you should come to think, "May these sentient beings have every form of happiness," which is the development of love. You also feel, "May they be without suffering." which is the development of compassion. You develop altruism when you feel,"The responsibility for carrying out these two has fallen on me. I, and I alone, shall I work for these ends."

We can achieve Buddhahood. We just have to practice having Wisdom and Compassion.

A talk on the Lam Rim by H.E. Tsem Tulku Rinpoche: