Satisfied Buddhist - Domo Geshe Rinpoche

I believe the spirit of enlightenment, the yearning to awaken this great aspiration, is like calling the muse. Great artists and great creative people might cultivate a mind capable of drawing the creative spirit close to them. I understand it used to be personified as the Athenial spirit of creativity. I didn’t know about muses before, but it certainly sounds like the dakinis doesn’t it? What we Tibetans would call the dakini might be called the muse in other cultures. An artist or poet might sit with their pen raised in the air while praying or entice the muse to arrive in order for them to be able to put their pen to paper and cause their work to become extraordinary. The powerful creative energy of the muse is the same as the creative energy of the higher tantric practices. The references in sadhanas to “May the Dakas and Dakinis...” is not ordinary because they are sacred energies connected to transcendent evolutionary development. However, we can make some connection betwee...

Todays blog is a direct transcript from 2002 with only minor transcribers editing. I have learned so much since arriving here in June 2000. Even the past two months I have learned so many new words, grammar using and communication through writing. I thank you all for giving me opportunity and I thank the everlasting Buddha that blesses and encourage me to do more. Please forgive my poor English in the following and note how much cultural education I was accumulating then. This is the Mahayana text which has to do with awakening a very special mind in your world-system, which wishes to be free. It is like the animal activist group PETA – they go to laboratories and open cages to free the animals, and many of the animals just sit in their cages. They don’t know what freedom is. In the same way, ordinary human beings don’t even know the name of freedom yet. You could say, “It’s possible to be free,” and they would say, “That’s nice. What’s on TV tonight?” Those of you who are irrepressibl...

It is not so easy to understand about gods. Some gods call themselves gods but they are not really gods, they are really bodhisattvas. Some are not really gods, they are Buddhas. However, ordinary gods or beings of other realms including the human realm might call them gods. That is why, in the higher reaches of Tibetan Buddhism, we do not offend them, because their intentions in general are far more benevolent than any ordinary Buddhist practitioner. In a previous discussion about the four great wishes, it does not matter if you are a fairy princess with your very first wand or a highly advanced practitioner with a sophisticated knowledge base to practice wishing benefit for others. You must train your entire being to wish for the release of sentient beings from suffering for your own energetic transformation. The purpose of practice is to create lasting change in the mind. You will need to experience the arisal of potential yourself. You are the practitioner and the one who needs t...

We just celebrated Losar here in Kalimpong, and could hear the Tibetans in the street even at 3AM calling to each other or from their open windows, “Losar Tashi Delek! Losar Tashi Delek! Losar Tashi Delek! Happy New Year!" If “Losar Tashi Delek” has the best effect, everyone greeted would be blessed with the four great wishes. (1) There is a special heartfelt quality when someone calls out to their friends and family, “Losar Tashi Delek! Happy New Year!” as opposed to “Oh, good morning, good to see you,” or “tashi delek, tashi delek” (sounds like tadelay) passing someone in the street. There is a cultivated strength of purpose behind Losar hellos. For sincere meditators there should be increased spiritual activation inside us greeting others with the correct use of the power of the four great wishes. Someone with greater spiritual purpose and power could simply say, “Tashi delek” and the accomplishment of the great wish blessing is manifested! If we train sincerely, we can bec...

So, there are different levels of Buddhas. There are also different classes of Buddhas, and different vows and promises and specializations as you might guess. If we think about the myriad beneficial activities of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, there must be some kind of overarching motivating principle that has a penchant for organizing and creation dharmic specialization fueled by the needs of sentient beings. There are formal vows taken by high level beings bestowed by even higher level Buddhas or self taken promises to achieve certain results for themselves or others in need. The experiences and tendencies that come from these vows also produce further activity. For example, Vajrasattva, the Buddha of purification took vows and made promises to help living beings purify. Green Tara and White Tara, have different specializations, different kinds of vows and promises for activities from each other as well as different than Vajrasattva. So it is not just their interest that produc...

If you are a meditator then you should have or be developing the ability to let go of unhappy thoughts by steady daily practice without expectations. Meditators already know they are experiencing suffering in their own mind and they are not the one that they want to be. We must be careful when practicing because if we watch ourselves too closely, we might unexpectedly arouse unhappy feelings. At the same time, we have made a commitment to become enlightened in order to become a benefit to all sentient beings and also because we want to change ourselves. You cannot both change and not change at the same time. The meditator makes a commitment to them self to change. It is pretty certain that when you were a baby, you pooped in your pants. If you see the look on the face of a child while they are pooping in their pants, it is just bliss! Like that, when you were a baby, that was your stage of development. You must have had a great deal of pleasure just being who you were, the bliss poope...

Do you have less love energy that you need flowing freely in your body and mind? What would it be like to feel love energy from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head, fingers, elbows, even behind the ears, a free flowing love that's everything that you need? This circulation of love energy is absolutely vital for your health. It's not just a nicety if we had enough love,we can't be healthy without it. From a Tibetan Buddhist point of view, writing about love energy makes me feel a bit weird.  However, I set aside my own personal views  because I know that this is something needed for good health although we addressed it in a different way. If we lived in a perfect society where, for example,  a family unit that had 20 or 30  members, you would  interact with others, and feel connected, loved and have a support system. In our Tibetan society, whether in a monastery or a family unit, we always felt that there was enough of this everywhere; we nev...