Question: Can the sins and obscurations accumulated form the past and present be cleansed by reciting “Yigja” with proper directives from a teacher?

Answer: If you are and were familiar with “Ngyondro” practice, it is explicitly narrated in detail as to how you should invoke the sins and obscuration healer deity “Dorji Sempa”, by visualizing during your meditation to cleanse all your past and present sinful thoughts, diseases and other deluded elements. Reciting “Yigja”: the one hundred syllables, is therefore very essential, because each words meaning of “Yigja” enables your obscured mind to be alert at all times and thus be inspired that your sins and obscurations are being sensitized through your mind’s overhauling technique. To be more familiar with the simple meanings of “Yigja”, refer to the “Comprehensive Throema Tsokhor” recitation Petcha book, published by me. 

Question: How does something recited by murmuring and assumed through imagination cleanse the objectless sins? If it can, will there be final a liberation by merely reciting or visualizing it?

 Answer: Recitations or visualizations are not the prime object to cleanse your objectless sins. It all depends on yourself being mindful about others and the Rigpa mind within you. Whenever you are satisfied to an extent that your mindfulness through any positive action had been helpful to have made someone happy; your own confidence at this juncture is called “Liberation”.

Therefore, the vow to perfect ourselves in order to help and perfect others is called the thought of enlightenment or Bodhichitta or Ngyondro. This means that every single action, word or thought, even the most disturbing emotions are dedicated to the good of all beings. We should develop an honest thought in the real meaning of the teachings, day after day, month after month and the spiritual qualities of a Bodhisattva or “Jangchub Sempa” will arise and develop without much difficulty. Before giving or listening to a teaching, both the master and the disciples should embark on the thought of enlightenment and pray that they may receive the blessings of all the past, present and future Buddhas and all the spiritual masters: “Dued Soem Sangay Guru Rinpoche…”

Meditation:
There are many ways of making the approach to meditation as joyful as possible. You can find the music that most exalts you and use it to open your heart and mind. You can collect pieces of poetry, or quotations or lines of teachings that over the years have moved you, and keep them always at hand to elevate your spirit. Bhutanese Thangka paintings derive strength from their beauty. You too can find reproductions of paintings that arouse a sense of sacredness, and hang them on the walls of your room.

Listen to a cassette tape of a teaching by a great master, or a sacred chant. You can make of the place where you meditate a simple paradise, with one flower, one stick of incense, one candle, one photograph of an enlightened master, or one statue of your favorite deity or a Buddha. You can transform the most ordinary of rooms into an intimate sacred space, an environment where every day you go to meet with your true self with all the joy and happy ceremony of one old friend greeting another.

The masters tell us that there is an aspect of our minds that is its fundamental basis, a state called “the ground of the ordinary mind.” It functions like a storehouse, in which the imprints of past actions caused by our negative emotions are all stored like seeds. When the right conditions arise, they germinate and manifest as circumstances and situations in our lives.

If we have a habit of thinking in a particular pattern, positive or negative, then these tendencies will be triggered and provoked very easily, and recur and go on recurring. With constant repetition our inclinations and habits become steadily more entrenched, and continue increasing and gathering power, even when we sleep. This is how they come to determine our life, our death, and our rebirth.

When the wisdom of Rigpa mind shines, a growing sense of tremendous and unshakable certainty and conviction that “this is it” rises up. There is nothing further to seek, nothing more that could possibly be hoped for. This certainty of the View is what has to be deepened through glimpse after glimpse of the nature of mind, and stabilized through the continuous discipline of meditation.

Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arising of the mind and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa mind, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other and this is very important than its “self-radiance,” the manifestation of its very energy.

Death and Impermanence:

Let us dare to imagine now what it would be like to live in a world where a significant number of people took the opportunity, offered by the teachings, to devote part of their lives to serious spiritual practice, to recognize the nature of their minds, and so to use the opportunity of their deaths to move closer to Buddha hood, and to be reborn with one aim, that of serving and benefiting others.

Compassion is a far greater and nobler thing than pity. Pity has its roots in fear and carries a sense of arrogance and condescension, sometimes even a smug feeling of “I’m glad it’s not me.” As Stephen Levine says: “When your fear touches someone’s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion.” To train in compassion is to know that all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor all those who suffer, and to know that you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone.

It is crucial now that an enlightened vision of death and dying should be introduced throughout the world at all levels of education. Children should not be “protected” from death, but introduced, while young, to the true nature of death and what they can learn from it.

Why not introduce this vision, in its simplest forms, to all age groups? Knowledge about death, about how to help the dying, and about the spiritual nature of death and dying should be made available to all levels of society; it should be taught, in depth and with real imagination, in schools and colleges and universities of all kinds; and especially and most important, it should be available in teaching hospitals to nurses and doctors who will look after the dying and who have so much responsibility to them.

Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come to them, their wives, their children, their friends, catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair!

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.

Montaigne once said: “To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

Question: What did the Buddha teach about magic and fortune telling?

Answer: The Buddha considered such practices as fortune telling, wearing magic charms for protection, fixing lucky sites for building, prophesizing and fixing lucky days to be useless superstitions and he expressly forbids his disciples to practice such thing. He calls all these things “low arts”.

“Whereas some religious men, while living off food provided by the faithful make their living by such low arts, such wrong means of livelihood as palmistry, divining by signs, interpreting dreams bringing good or bad luck, invoking the goddess of luck, picking the lucky site for a building, the monk Gotama refrains from such low arts, such wrong means of livelihood.

Question: But some lucky charms do work, don’t they?
Answer: I know a person who makes living selling lucky charms. He claims that his charms can give good luck, prosperity and he guarantees that you will be able to pick three numbers. But if what he says is true then why isn’t he himself a multi-millionaire? If his lucky charm really works, then why doesn’t he win the lottery week after week? The only luck he has is that there are people silly enough to buy his magic charms. 

Meditation:

For all its dangers, today’s world is also a very exciting one. The modern mind is slowly opening to different visions of reality. Great teachers like the Dalai Lama and late Mother Teresa can be seen on television; many inspiring masters from the land of medicine (Menjong Drukyul) now visit and teach in the West; and books from all the mystical traditions are winning an increasingly large audience through effective translation. The desperate situation of the planet is slowly waking people up to the necessity for transformation on a global scale.

Enlightenment is real, and there are enlightened masters still on the earth. When you actually meet one, you will be shaken and moved in the depths of your heart and you will realize that all the words, such as illumination and wisdom that you thought were only ideas are in fact true.

Guru Dudjom Rinpoche’s quote: “In meditation practice, you might experience a muddy, semiconscious, drifting state, like having a hood over your head: a dreamy dullness. This is really nothing more than a kind of blurred and mindless stagnation. How do you get out of this state? Alert yourself, straighten your back, breathe the stale air out of your lungs, and direct your awareness into clear space to freshen your mind. If you remain in this stagnant state you will not evolve, so whenever this setback arises, clear it again and again. It is important to be as watchful as possible, and to stay as vigilant as you can.”

Death and Impermanence:

From our own experience it is to hard imagine taking on the sufferings of others, and especially those of sick and dying people, without first building our own strength and confidence of compassion. It is this strength and this confidence that will give us the power to transmute the suffering of others.

This is why it is highly recommended to begin with “Tonglen” (Selflessness) practice for others by first practicing it on our self before we can send out our love and compassion to others, we must uncover, deepen, create, and strengthen them in our self, and heal our self of any reticence or distress or anger or fear that might create an obstacle to practicing “Tonglen” wholeheartedly.

Question: How essential is performing “Gayshi” as part of the prayer every night?
Answer: A person’s thoughts and beliefs shape his life, experiences and circumstances. Like mirrors, all of us become like our own reflected mental images. We behold the reflection of our own character and inner thoughts. Until you realize that your own character is but the effect of your own thoughts and beliefs, you will remain a victim of circumstances.  But once you realize this great truth, you have started on the long journey, which will enable you to be free from the poison of ill will.

Whether it is essential to perform Gayshi from Throema or Ngyondro recitations as part of your prayer at night, morning or day is your own choice. Buddha himself said that we carefully consider, investigate and verify for ourselves before accepting anything. After all, he made no exception whatsoever. If we find that certain teachings are good, that it is wholesome and leads to eradication of greed, hatred and delusion, there is no harm accepting it.

Question: What will be the simplest visualization you will advice for those who are not able to understand the word meanings?
Answer: The simplest visualization I could advice is to practice a religion that enables us to undergo spiritual transformation which arises from within, rather than from without. It is not external appearance that makes a person noble, but internal purification and an exemplary life. Rank, caste, color and even wealth and power do not necessarily make a gentleman. Only character makes a person great and worthy of honor.

Venerable Visuddhacara said: “A tree is known by its fruit. Similarly, a true religion must produce permanent results. In this sense, it is quite right to judge a religion by its results. A religion, which enables us to understand better the nature of life, can enable us to accept the various forms of happiness as it arises during the various phases of our life. A religion, which enables us to understand the nature of life, can enable us to accept the various forms of happiness as it arises during the various phases of our life.”