Apr 09

Kalu Rinpoche | Transforming Our Ordinary Emotion to Clarity (Part 8)

So therefore, it is very important that, when you become a Buddhist practitioner, you should eat, drink, do whatever you want, you know, be wild, whatever it is! But eventually, you know, eventually, it is important to be freed and renounced, one after another, one after another.

And once you have developed the sense of honesty to oneself and then the sense of genuine to oneself, that loving kindness and compassionate state of mind, it is there. You don’t have to try, you don’t have to push, you don’t have to make a prayer for your loving kindness to benefit all the sentient beings. You don’t have to bring an excuse of that kind to yourself and say “oh I am a terrible practitioner, I have no love and no compassion to all the sentient beings”.

It can’t approach like that, it doesn’t work like that. The meaning of love, the meaning of compassion is not a beautiful feeling that you can just buy it and get it. It is a realization, quality of mind. It is not an object. There are many things that you can work hard, you can earn money, you can buy it. Compassion is not a material object, it is a realization state of mind.

The true meaning of understanding of compassion is a suffering … suffering of all the sentient beings. Suffering of all the sentient beings can be understood only when you understand the reality of the suffering. In order to have that capacity of understanding, you must develop compassion. In order to develop compassion, you need to create a space between the fixation and the reality of what you are perceiving. When there is no gap between the fixation in oneself, compassion is just an imagination that we are trying to be good, it will not really help others.

Even you can, you’ll be vulnerable to all the criticisms that you may receive. When you are genuinely compassionate, criticism is no longer painful; it is just part of the wave. That will come, that will go. Pride, that people speak good about you, that also becomes like a wave, comes and it goes.

So therefore, it is very important, in order to develop genuine loving kindness, we must have a genuine awareness to oneself; in order to develop genuine awareness into oneself you must have a basic, basic human genuine to oneself. And then based upon that, seeing the reality of the suffering, the reality of life, as it is. Examining the very sensation of the attachment, the sensation of the suffering, not the object, not the person, not the country, not the material.

Once you have that sort of a conclusion, and then honesty, transparency tend to develop. And the pretentious attitude will dissolve. So that’s that.

 

Transforming Our Ordinary Emotion to Clarity by Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche
Hawaiï Association of International Buddhists – Saturday, Feb 19, 2022 (34′ 12”)

To be continued …