Kalu Rinpoche | Keep the Dharma Alive (Part 1)

I just want to say to my general audience here, there was one person, Gelek Jinpa, for a New Year’s resolution, to please give some words and advice on how to do that.
I said, well, you know as a Himalayan person, as a Buddhist practitioner, as a person who has grown up in the Himalayan region, that I have influence of friends and family of India, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, all the combined culture that I grew up with, and I said the most important as a New Year’s resolution is ‘be a little bit kinder towards our seniors’.

You don’t have to completely forget them, be a little bit kind. Not every senior is easy to handle, some of them are very stubborn, very arrogant, but to give just a little bit of compassion and understanding would be great.

The second thing would be to improve our mental attitude and spiritual attitude.

The third thing is, in regard to looking after this current and next generation, because in some countries like Korea or Japan, there are so many people who believe so many religions or not any religion at all whatsoever. The Buddhism there is in a very vulnerable state. So we as Himalayan Buddhists, it is our duty to introduce it to the next generation.
When we say ‘introduce to the next generation’, it doesn’t mean that you have to drag them to the temple forcefully, or to become a nun or monk and all that. You just have to do according to the time, right?, you do according to the time.

‘Trying to keep the tradition alive’, doesn’t mean you have to go back to the past few hundred years. There are so many religious figures who are trying to go back to six hundred years or how they used to live their lives. That’s unrealistic. As a Buddhist we should be doing the opposite, not going back to the past in terms of how we lived our life and all this hierarchy and things like that.

So it’s important that you introduce correctly, for example, repeat some teachings of H.H. Dalai Lama, or the Buddha’s teaching, and open it up for discussion, repeat to them a few times. Let them ask questions, let them have doubts, let them be skeptical, let them interact with you.