A comment on "Choose your guru always"

Over the years, I have seen people come and go. There have been people who wax lyrical about Rinpoche, and people who back-stab. There have been people who devote themselves to Rinpoche, and people who use Rinpoche to get what they can out of him, and then conveniently forgotten about Rinpoche when the contact no longer suits their purposes.

It’s this last one that particularly rankles me because of the ingratitude. What such individuals don’t realise is that everything good and beneficial that we have in our lives is because of our lama, who connected us to the Dharma. Our kids are in school, our companies are successes, some have even found fame and in some cases, had our lives saved because of the advice from our teacher. Call guru devotion fanaticism if you want, but I like to think of it more as gratitude and repaying our teacher’s many kindnesses which extend beyond this life alone.

It helps to consider where we were before we met our teachers and why we came into the Dharma in the first place. Did we come because everything in our lives was just dandy, or did we come because something was missing? Or something was wrong and needed fixing? Maybe this teacher, this organisation, this tradition, this lineage isn’t for us but in the time we were here, it is hard to deny that despite the difficulties, our teacher guided us to do good things and to help others. In the process, we helped ourselves by curbing our own negative habits for a time. Who else would have been able to guide and train us in this manner?

So wouldn’t it behoove us to show some gratitude and to choose our guru, always?

Rinpoche on a recent photo shoot, providing art direction. Rinpoche’s care extends to every aspect of the Kechara organisation and its members.

Blog post:

http://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/buddhas-dharma/choose-your-guru-always.html

Comment:

There is no doubt that Rinpoche is right in saying it is not the lama, but our mind.

How is it not the lama? If it is the lama, then EVERYONE who comes in contact with the lama will never improve because there’s nothing from/about the lama that will nurture improvement in the people he interacts with. BUT if other people around the lama are improving but we ourselves are not, then it is not the lama. It means the responsibility for our lack of improvement lies with us. It doesn’t make us bad; it just means we haven’t been doing what we need to do, in order to gain the greatest benefit from our time with our teachers.

As Rinpoche says, Rinpoche’s guru devotion in Zong Rinpoche has been a source of strength for the last 30 years and if we emulate Rinpoche’s example, we will experience the same benefits. I was thinking about this the other day because something happened that disturbed me. The more I thought about it, the more my mind spiralled. The only time I wasn’t disturbed by the incident was when I was busy working, and my mind was occupied with thinking about something else.

That’s when I realised, things hurt less when we think of ourselves less. When we let go of ‘me’, and we stop thinking of everything in relations to ourselves, the pain immediately lessens because there’s no sense of you to be hurt. I guess that’s why meditating on emptiness is so important; if there is no inherent you, then there’s no inherent you to hurt and to be disturbed.

All of us will have our ups and downs, or our good and bad days but if we focus out and use our teachers as a focal point, it makes it much easier to weather the storms. We spend less time consumed by our negative thoughts, which allows us to expend energy and focus towards other things, for example completing our assignments well and on time. Having a guru as a focal point trains us to think out and about someone else always, and the more we focus out, the more result-oriented we become and logically, the more results we have.

Reflections and Teachings