Feb 21

Kalu Rinpoche | Transforming Our Ordinary Emotion to Clarity (Part 1)

Tashi Delek, to everyone and especially to our hosts.

I want to say thank you very much for inviting me, to give a talk, to share with your Sanghas. And also continuing the legacy and purpose of the Hawaiian Buddhist Association to broaden its reach to its people who are searching for the spirituality and giving them what is genuine and making a distinction of what is Buddhism, what is not. I want to say thank you for upholding your responsibility and please continue to do so. So that’s that. So this thing that you have just witnessed, the whole, the biography, of course it’s carefully written, it’s very impressive. So in case you’re not enlightened by the end of this session, and then please, you know, don’t be disappointed. So that’s that.

First of all, I want to say greetings to everybody. Thank you very much for being here and sharing your time with me and sharing your dedication, wanting to learn Dharma. I just want to say thank you for your dedication and commitment, making my life more meaningful as I engage with all of you. So that’s that.

So the title is of course “How to transform our ordinary emotions to the state of the clarity”. That’s the title of our session.

And I think it is very important to understand that, in order to become a “good Buddhist”, we have to become a good human being first. We cannot be “Buddhist” without being a good human being, you know. So that foundation is very important. Many people they like to use the Buddhism as an image to promote their wrongdoing and justification of their pretentious attitude to others, deceivingly.

So therefore it is very important for us as a Buddhist practitioner, whether you are, you know, Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, whether you are Indian Buddhist practitioner, whether you are Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Thai, Sri Lankan, or Burmese, or Cambodian, it really doesn’t matter, you know. The foundation is that, being genuine to oneself, it is very important.

That’s why His Holiness Dalai Lama, the Great Fourteenth, he always gives the emphasis and the importance of the emotional hygiene, you know. Rather than saying that, you know, “I am a Buddhist master, and everybody has to learn from me”, you know, instead of saying that, he says that we have to take care of our emotional hygiene as much as we look after our physical and appearance of oneself, you know? We are very much distracted, and we are overwhelmed by that reality. So therefore it is very important to somehow, to find some sort of a balance, some sort of a clarity, in oneself.

 

Transforming Our Ordinary Emotion to Clarity by Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche
Hawaiï Association of International Buddhists – Saturday, Feb 19, 2022

To be continued …