Sydney and the 14th Dalai Lama

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.