Читать книгу The Buddha Book: Buddhas, blessings, prayers, and rituals to grant you love, wisdom, and healing - Lillian Too - Страница 11

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!