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billiegourd · 5 years

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A Misty Silver Drizzling Morning - Padmasambhava's Teachings of Life, Death and Rebirth

Hello, respectable one! Perceive that you are in the between. Presently, since the existence cycle is in suspension, everything sunrise as lights and gods. All space first lights loaded with purplish blue lights...pure reality show in inconspicuous, amazing dreams, strikingly experienced, normally terrifying. Don't fear...you can't kick the bucket. It is sufficient just to perceive such dreams as your very own discernments. - Tibetan Book of the Dead (The Great Book of Natural Liberation through Understanding in the Between, Sogyal Rinpoche trans.) LCA

Dreading demise, I went to the mountains. Again and again, I mulled over death's erratic coming, and took the fortress of the deathless, constant nature. Presently I am past all dread of biting the dust!- - Milarepa

On a delicately coming down dim morning at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, 2006, I heard Thondup Tulku educate about the bardos, the go-between stages, "the among" death and resurrection. Once in hospice, I realized a Buddhist who needed The Tibetan Book of the Dead to be perused to him in his perishing (additionally a bardo: the "among" biting the dust and last passing). He felt it would "assist him with accomplishing freedom." This book is said to have been composed by Padmasambhava who carried Buddhism to Tibet. Karma Lingpa discovered this "treasure" in the fourteenth century.

Accounts of Padmasambhava's life give me the certainty that incredible power can emerge with the act of Buddhist contemplation and that power is intended to be utilized to benefit humankind. Said to be a spread of Buddha Amitabha, Padmasambhava made a trip from India to Tibet to present Tantric Buddhism. He was said to beat strong devils. His buddy, the abbot Santarakshita, brought the sutras and good statutes of the Buddha from India. Padmasambhava was welcome to Tibet by King Trisong Dessen around 750 C.E.

There was a workmanship presentation in 1998 at the Hungtington Art Museum which included an amazing thanka of Padmasambhava, with a little scaled Buddha Amitabha above him. Padmasambhava is delineated with His Eight Forms, speaking to eight snags that Padmasambhava defeated in his own otherworldly arousing into shrewdness, empathy and a comprehensive awareness. These Eight structures are lessons for the understudy to know their specific impediments to full otherworldly arousing. Buddhism instructs me that I should encounter straightforwardly positive sentiments about myself as well as the afflictive feelings inside me of outrage, profound forlornness, remorse, jealousies, feelings of disdain, and perniciousness. Padmasambhava is a brilliant illustration of the genuine master showing direct edification to his understudies through an act of good purging and committed reflection.

Padmasambhava, the incomparable Buddhist yogi of the tantras, or recondite practices, is brilliantly painted on the cotton thanka, with profound misty mineral shades in water based collagen, reds, golds, blacks, grays, blues, pearls, greens, oranges. He sits with preeminent pride and feeling of profound achievement, wearing a red robe. He's perched on a lotus which is by all accounts rising, turns in ceremonial positions, right hand holding the vajra, symbolizing the interminable idea of essential fact of the matter, indestructible as a jewel of precious stones. He's encompassed by his different structures, different Buddhas and consorts. His left hand holds a skull cup; passing is available. An adroit's staff inclines toward his left shoulder.

Padmasambhava was a lord himself in India, however chose to leave his customary social ways, as high class as they were, to seek after what might remove his inclination disappointed with life. He started to see profoundly the temporariness of life. He pondered in numerous charnel grounds. When Padmasambhava was an educator in Tibet, he showed "defensive" powers which permitted the Dharma, the lessons about the finish of affliction and the importance of genuine satisfaction, to be built up as the predominant religion of Tibet. He was said to have the option to "survive" the satanic impacts of viciousness and strife. Padmasambhava showed supporters; deciphered Buddhist writings from Sanskirit into Tibetan. He meandered all through Tibet, with his dearest partner, Yeshe Tsogyal who recorded his lessons.

Evaluating that the instructing of the Dharma in Tibet was satisfied, Padmasambhava chose to live his last days on Yak-Tail Island, southwest of India where he placated the local man-eaters. Through his extraordinary yogic forces, sympathy, and immaculate reflection practice, he showed his understudies to defeat all dread by living in his "Royal residence of Lotus Light," the experience of the Eternal.

The Tibetan Buddhist see the procedures of birth and demise and resurrection as a chance to grow profoundly, even with the likelihood that one could perceive the idea of the brain and heart and be free. This absolutely "mental" process (encounters in cognizance) is said to keep going for forty-nine days. We don't really need to accept these lessons as strict; we can apply the lessons to any circumstance of fleetingness, change, gain, misfortune, kicking the bucket and restoration. In reflection, we regularly note the "interim" between the in and out breaths. So much "emerging," "staying," "stopping to be." Every day living.

Thondup addresses us about the lessons of Padmasambhava; Thondup talks without notes, looking to the "separation" over our heads; he's slight, has salt and pepper team trimmed hair, maroon-robed, with a consumed orange shirt. He's sitting in a dark colored and white padded seat, feet on the floor. A paper and a brocade thanka are hung up behind him. To the sides are little tables with four yellow tulips in a pot and a jar of pink and purple lilies.

We do a primer contemplation of unwinding and relaxing our applied personalities and mooring ourselves in a quiet perspective, letting our bustling musings gradually subside. At that point we "broaden and extend the vitality of our contemplation, cheering for this life."

Thondup urges us to work on improving the quality and propensities for our psyches; we will at that point appreciate such "propensities" and demeanors after death when the cognizance - whenever developed - will encounter the iridescent state, clear and open, "first light's sky," alongside both sweet and startling sounds and structures. Unnerving, radiant, supporting, compromising, stunning encounters happen.

"In the event that your mind handles sticks deflects - how I need this or how I need to push this away- - at that point you may get oblivious. The "light" and the divinities and shows and "voyaging" are not a few articles, however articulations of your own condition of cognizance."

You may show up before inviting Buddhas or holy people to manage you; you may experience "hells" or "sky." Your encounters are socially affected. A Christian may meet Jesus. Strolling a limited way, you may discover a "buddy." You may experience the Lord of Death, where you are reflected the "great" and "terrible" deeds of your life. You may enter the Pure Land, human life, become creatures, experience universes of the envious divine beings or domains of longing for however not fulfilled "hungry phantoms." All this is conceivable inside your very own awareness.

Reginald Ray: "The benefit of the human domain is that in the domains above it, there is so a lot of bliss that creatures are not propelled to change their circumstance, while in the domains beneath it, there is so a lot of enduring that creatures can't get adequate good ways from it to learn and change. In the human domain alone there is sufficient languishing to give inspiration over otherworldly improvement, yet less that creatures are squashed by it."

Thondup proposed that we keep on developing adoration, shrewdness and the yearning to help other people. We wish for ourselves and all to be upbeat and to be at long last "freed" from the cycle of birth-life-demise resurrection. Such an acknowledgment is at long last "unspeakable."

As I headed home, I flashed Thondup a gesture of goodwill. I consider Kabir: "Companion, trust in the Guest while you are alive. Bounce into experience...what you call 'salvation' has a place with the time before death. On the off chance that you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you figure apparitions will do it after? In the event that you have intercourse with the awesome now, in the following life, you will have the substance of fulfilled want." ThondupTulku grinned back and waved farewell.

*Tulku Thondup Rinpoche was conceived in Golok, Eastern Tibet. He entered his preparation period in a Nyingma religious community until political changes in Tibet constrained him to escape to India in 1958.

Thondup showed Tibetan and Tibetan writing at Lucknow University (1967-76) and Visva Bharati University (1976-80). In 1980, Thondup came to Harvard University as a meeting researcher. For as long as 23 years, he has been living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where shows Tibetan Buddhism, especially Nyingma Buddhism. Thondup goes all through North America and Europe, driving recuperating reflection workshops.

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