All roads
lead to Sydney lately. I love Sydney in
winter, taking an early morning flight out of Melbourne, away from the great
southern bi(gh)te and all that grey-making rain. My compass resets, I'm pulled north. It's more than the weather, it’s the girl from the Sydney suburbs, and three days last
month listening to His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, teach the Buddhist
concept of Bodhicitta. Simply put Bodhicitta is the determination to become enlightened for the
sake of others. The text which formed
the centre piece of the three day talk was Vast
as the Heavens Deep as the Sea, a collection of searingly and deceptively
simple verse, from the Tibetan scholar and monk, Khunu Rinpoche Tenzin Gyaltsen
from whom the Dalai Lama received a direct oral transmission of the teaching. Its a beautiful piece of
poetry, Khunu Rinpoche penned each of the 356 verses as a thought for the day
in his 1959 diary, the very same year the Chinese suppressed a Tibetan national
uprising in Lhasa, forcing the Dalai Lama into exile.
When I'm
asked about Buddhism one of the first things that springs to mind is a point the
Dalai Lama made repeatedly over the three days of teaching - Buddhism asks you
to test all its precepts, not to take the instructions as a given from a higher
authority, or from the learned ones ensconced in their sacred places. 'Buddha said you should not accept my
teaching out of faith, Buddhism believes there is no independent soul or self,
these are creations of the mind.'
Listening to the Dalai Lama I'm reminded he is a man of science and
enquiry more than a man of the spiritual realm, he relies on empirical proof,
not the leap of faith so many of us stumble over. Buddhism asks us to take everything apart -
to ask, to challenge, to seek, and ultimately not to find and that not
finding is emptiness, the last and hardest Buddhist teaching to understand. Buddha was a teacher, not a creator, the
Dalai Lama is firm on this point.
For the
Tibetan people the prospect that the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama may
not be found by monks in a Chinese dominated and controlled Tibet is a deep
sadness. China's crackdown on Tibetan
Buddhism ejected the Dalai Lama from his own land and brought these ancient
Buddhist teachings to a wider western audience already looking east after the social
upheavals of the 60's and 70's. As I
looked around the predominantly white, affluent and female audience in Sydney I reflected on the pollinations that political and economic ambitions
unwittingly unleash.
Verse 294
In
general, a virtuous thought arises only with difficulty;
even more
difficult than that is the beginning of the Buddhist path;
yet more
difficult is the arising of precious bodhicitta;
nevertheless, one generates it by making an effort.
