we strive to comprehend – this is the realization that is the state of enlightenment. It is the sorrowless state, a state of no more learning; it is the state of awakening that we constantly strive to reach.
So in meeting my highest high lama, Buddha’s teachings engaged my heart and my mind. I recall the scenery before me, and being seated behind the slightly bent back of my lama. I do not see his face. I only feel his presence and am overwhelmed with devotion. He is meditating and wears a light-colored robe. He bears no physical resemblance to my Rinpoche of this life. My conviction that they are one and the same comes from somewhere deep inside me. It is experiential, and I have no way of knowing if it is true. It is true for me only because I believe it. In this life, I know that my feeling for Rinpoche is something karmic, because I recognize him and I revere him. My devotion to Rinpoche as my guru from many past lives comes from somewhere within me. It requires no effort for me to revere him.
CONNECTING AGAIN IN THIS LIFE
After connecting again with Rinpoche in this life, wherever he happened to be I would try my hardest also to be – and the year I met him became unforgettable. My mind and head went into a tailspin that was painful and blissful at the same time. I think I had been blind for so long to the real nature of existence that the delusions of success, wealth, and glamor had made the ego and the self-cherishing mind excessively dominant. The cleansing process was painful and wrenching – it was all felt inside my head!
But Rinpoche was incredibly kind to me – in some past lives I must have done a few things right, for the good karma ripened magnificently. I met my Buddha and realized it. I recognized my teacher. I was ready for him when he materialized in my life.
So I did what he advised me to do. I chanted purifying mantras to cleanse away eons of negative karma. I changed my attitudes and made a real effort to show compassion for others. I watched my mind and made the effort to transform it. I studied the translated texts on mind transformation, attended precious teachings, took refuge and initiations that would bring me closer to the buddha-deities, and started practicing meditations and spiritual visualizations. It was all rather heady stuff, and many times my egoistic mind rebelled and I blew my top. But again and again I would come back to the path, to the Dharma (spiritual practice).
It did not take me long to see Rinpoche as an emanation of the great lineage of teachers who accept rebirth with the sole purpose of bringing the message of compassion and wisdom to many people. A special divine being, or holy bodhisattva, Rinpoche is one of the living buddhas who walk the face of the earth. Since beginningless time they have been among us, manifesting as humble monks or in other guises, and guiding those whose karma it is to meet and know them toward the ultimate bliss of enlightened existence. In meeting Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche once again, I met my living emanation of Buddha, who was to show me amazing new pathways on which my mind could travel.
THE MULTITUDE OF BUDDHAS
Through Rinpoche, I met many other buddhas, who appeared in different forms and colors. There are white, red, green, yellow, and blue buddhas. There are buddhas with gentle, loving faces and benign expressions, and there are wrathful, fearsome buddhas. There are buddhas with the appearance of humans, and those that appear as frightful beings with animal heads. There are single– and multi-faced buddhas, just as there are buddhas with 1,000 arms and several eyes. There are buddhas who appear as a single entity, and buddhas who manifest with consorts. There are male and female buddhas.
Rinpoche has told me that there are 1,000 buddhas in this eon, and in the Diamond Cutter Sutra, Shakyamuni himself (the historical Buddha) refers to 840 billion billion buddhas … and he pleased them all before he attained enlightenment himself.
This revelation really blew my mind, because all my life I had thought of the Buddha as a single entity, as a “God presence.” I had read the life story of the Buddha (see here). I had always described myself as a Buddhist when filling out forms, but it was meaningless because my idea of Buddhism was very limited. I suspect this is the case for many others – overseas Chinese like me, who come from a traditional Buddhist background, but whose knowledge of what this means is woefully limited. Getting to know the buddhas through Rinpoche opened my eyes to a glorious new world – one that conjured up rich, colorful images within the deepest recesses of my mind.
This buddha is three hundred years old; I invited him into my home some fifteen years before meeting Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche.
Once I was with Rinpoche in Singapore. It was the night of May 16, 1998 – I had requested to see him and had waited throughout the day. By the time Rinpoche’s appointments were through, it was close to 2 a.m. I was very sleepy and, as we drove Rinpoche back to where he was staying, I could not prevent my disappointment from showing. I told him that I would wish him good night, as I was flying home early the next morning. That was when he surprised me. “Maybe you can take a shower,” he smiled as he saw me stifling a yawn. I could not believe it! Rinpoche had gone from one meeting to the next – blessing a hospice, seeing a sick disciple, giving a teaching, sitting down to dinner with a group of Buddhists, and meeting hundreds of people, all eager to get blessings from him. Yet here he was at two o’clock in the morning still prepared to meet yet one more unimportant student – me!
MEETING BUDDHA
That night was a major turning point for me, because Rinpoche gave me a picture of the guru “merit field” (see here) – a picture depicting all the gurus and all the buddhas in the sky – and he gave me a magnificent teaching on how to meditate on the merit field. He explained the different emanations of the buddhas and the essence of guru yoga practice (see here), the root of the spiritual pathway to enlightenment.
I think I really met Buddha that night. He came to me in the mind, body, and speech of my guru, and then I understood why devotion to your guru is so vital in the spiritual journey to enlightenment, to ultimate happiness, to the state of sorrowless bliss.
In the quiet of the night when the world was asleep, that May evening, Rinpoche closed his eyes and said simply, “You write.” So I took out my pen and notebook and wrote as Rinpoche talked. His voice was low and he spoke slowly to make certain I did not miss a single word.
I discovered that night that my lama, my guru, is the manifestation of all the Buddhas’ holy mind – what we call the Dharmakaya, which is the transcendental wisdom of non-dual bliss and voidness. The Dharmakaya is the unified primordial savior, which has no beginning and no end, the holy mind of the Buddhas. It pervades all existence, including my heart, my head, my hands, and so on. So my lama is in fact my absolute guru, and is bound by infinite compassion toward me and all other sentient beings. He manifests and benefits me and all sentient beings, bringing us from happiness to happiness; to liberation from samsara (cyclic existence); and especially to the highest enlightenment.
The explanation of the emanation of the guru as embodying the Buddha’s holy mind is simple. Because our minds are impure, blinded by karmic obstacles, we are prevented from seeing the divine presence of the buddhas. So numberless buddhas can appear in front of us, and because of the obscured nature of our minds we do not have the ability to see them. So buddhas, in their great compassion, emanate as ordinary beings.
The pure but ordinary form that we can “see” is the conventional guru, and that the guru’s holy mind is the absolute guru. So those of us who are fortunate enough to meet perfectly qualified
