Satisfied Buddhist - Domo Geshe Rinpoche

Dialogue with students at the White Conch retreat in Bali. Rinpoche: So, we have a unique opportunity to quietly sit and observe the direct relationship that Balinese people have with rice. They plant the rice, watch over and weed it, and when it’s time to harvest, they cut it, dry it and eat it. However, your relationship with rice is more complicated, isn’t it? What’s your relationship with rice ? (laughter). You do have a relationship with rice or do you just think the word rice, and rice appears? No, what do you have to do to actually eat the rice? Student: Cook it. R: No. S: Go to a restaurant? R: No. If you go to a restaurant and say “give me rice,” are they just going to give you rice? No. S: Money. R: Money! Okay. So, what's your actual dynamic with rice now? S: It’s an exchange. R: Even before that! You can’t get the exchange without doing something. You are not even prepared to earn exchange. S: You have to work….. R: You have to work, but who cares? You’re no good at ...

Here we are in central Bali on retreat, we have the opportunity to meditate here, enjoying the tropical breezes, and on two sides of our retreat place, we have beautiful rice paddies. To us, it is very decorative, is it not? We hear ducks quacking and rustling through the rice paddy, and it has an exotic and scenic feel for us. On the other hand, the backbreaking work required for many workers to create rice;…. to put rice in your bowl is an important part of the survival of earlier Asians. Even here, and in this modern time it is still not mechanized; there is a very simple connection with the earth; stooping to pull weeds and to gather the rice using a curved knife to cut the grain. So, we have a unique opportunity here to quietly sit here observing the direct relationship that Balinese people have with rice. They plant the rice, watch over and weed it, and when it is time to harvest, they cut it, dry it and eat it. However, your relationship with rice is more complicated, isn’t it? ...

Around 1945, I was a young rinpoche in a monastery in Tibet in my just previous life. I lived with about 18 other boys in a house on the grounds of Sera Je Monastery in Lhasa called a kangsen. I suppose it is a kind of fraternity house. One day we received a teaching that stayed with me even past the end of that life! A single grain of rice was held up by our teacher; “This is something which appears to be insignificant. And yet, at great personal expense, a farmer had to bend over and stand in water with leaches and other terrible things, pushing the rice plant in the wetness. He had to bend over again and again weeding and caring for the rice. If the harvest was not damaged and survived to be harvested, this grain and others were dried and beaten to take off the chaff. Later, this very grain of rice was loaded and carried by horseback for long distances to arrive here at our kangsen.” Our teacher told us that we harbored an enemy inside our minds so bad that it prevented us from...