Читать книгу The Buddha Book: Buddhas, blessings, prayers, and rituals to grant you love, wisdom, and healing - Lillian Too - Страница 12

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 lamas have, in effect, met “buddhas” in their ordinary aspect. This is the aspect that can guide us from the lower realms to the human realms, from samsara to enlightenment.

It is understanding this that makes us realize that even the ordinary aspect of the Buddha is extremely precious. And all the numberless buddhas – Shakyamuni, Tara, Maitreya, Vajrasattva, Amitabha, and so on – all the buddhas of this eon can guide us, interact with us, through the ordinary aspect of the guru. This is why when we meet a lama who can lead us on the journey to enlightenment he becomes the most precious and most kind being – the most important being – in our life.

Because without him we are lost in samsara – guideless, moving from one rebirth to the next, unceasingly creating causes for rebirth in the lower realms and ignorant of the way to attain liberation and ultimately reach the sorrowless state of enlightenment. It is the lama, or guru, who embodies all the buddhas, and realizing this becomes the foundation of the spiritual journey to bliss.

Buddhas are best thought of as a visualized presence. And since we are unable to “see” real buddhas, images of them also become extremely precious, because they can help us imagine their presence. Thus pictures, thangka paintings on cloth, statues (also known as rupas), and all forms of Buddhist art are revered as precious holy objects, because they actually help us “see” Buddha in our mind’s eye.

Of course I have never seen or met any of the buddhas about whom Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche has told me, except perhaps in dreams or when I am hallucinating. Yet meeting them, even through the dimension of visualization, has enriched my life in the most meaningful way. My home is filled with beautiful Buddhist art and it has become easy to visualize the light emanation of the buddhas, who for me have come to represent so many aspects of the spiritual path.