Q: I am a teacher and speaking of anger, I do have some issues. Even though I try my best I practice meditation but during these 5 years I do have one student that just pushes all my buttons and he provokes me in a way that it is really difficult for me in that moment to just be an observer. So I did hear your suggestions on acknowledging the anger and moving it but if I do have just that moment, just that minute, I would love to hear anything that you could suggest to me to try and stay calm in that moment and understanding that I have 30 more people who are waiting for my reaction, I’d love to get better on that. Thank you.
Kalu Rinpoche: Okay, so to be familiar with you, so I have to be familiar with you in order to make you understand where I stand in my responsibility.
As a reincarnation of Kalu Rinpoche, in 2009 I took the responsibility of our organisation. So it is a little bit like this Centre, so like there is a Gelugpa school but there is a late Lama Zopa Rinpoche who formed the FPMT [Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition] Dharma Centre that all the meditation centre under his network working together and so on so forth. So similar to that I took that responsibility when I was 18 years old.
So Previous Kalu Rinpoche has established a lot of Dharma centres, meditation centres around the world. So when you say responsibility that meant the whole responsibility, so basically you have to look after the finance, legal structure as well as a being a spiritual director.
Whenever there is a crisis, you have to be there, you can’t say “I make a prayer for you, I share my compassion with you, I send my good vibe to you” [haha]. It doesn’t work. Then they also say “you are Kalu Rinpoche, you are a Buddhist teacher, whatever you say we listen” and then you say it, what they should be doing, and they don’t listen.
So it is similar, right? So you are at the school as a teacher, they are supposed to listen, ideally, but they don’t listen, they want you to react in a certain way, to make them satisfied to some kind of a small thing to talk about it, within the school, within the gossip, within the classmate. “Ah look how the teacher react”, just basically meaningless, it’s not virtuous at all, it’s not meaningful at all.
So similar to that, in my responsibility, people tend to push the button one after another, sometime simultaneously from different angle, sometime from different generations, from the senior generation, from the younger generation, and then from your inner circle as well. So you have all this kind of a pushing to the limit, right? And sometime they want you to react very unholy as possible, let’s put it like this. Because you have the image of Rinpoche, the Buddhist teacher. So they want you to react as humanly as possible like screaming, shouting, so on and so forth.
I think since I took the responsibility, since 2008, I remember how many times I got angry. I can count in my fingers. Most of the time it is just great sadness rather than anger. The reason why that happened is that you are practitioner. So what happens is that there is a few stages.
If I didn’t do the 3 year retreat and had not been given this responsibility, I don’t think I would survive more than a year, very simple. Because of the retreat, because of the practice, I managed to survive, maintain, have analytical understanding of my emotions, only because of the practice.
His Eminence Kalu Rinpoche in Riga, Latvia
How to understand and apply the Buddhist wisdom of emptiness in everyday life (Q&A 1)
Ganden Center – September 2024 (31′ 15”)
To be continued…
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