Relevance of the Guru in Buddhism

by Chagdud Khadro

(originally published on Ordinary Mind, Evam Institute Quarterly, Spring 1999 — this was a magazine published in Australia by the late Traleg Kyabgom Rinpoche.)

Born in 1946, Chagdud Khadro is the American wife of Chagdud Tulku, Rinpoche. Originally a freelance writer in New York Chagdud Khadro travelled to Northern India in 1977, intending to earn a living as a correspondent. Instead she was introduced to Buddhism and took refuge in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The following year she met and married Chagdud Rinpoche in Nepal.

In 1979 she moved with him to California, after he immigrated to the United States, in 1980 they settled in Oregon, where Rinpoche began a 15 year period of teaching and establishing Buddhist centres in North America. In 1995. Chagdud Rinpoche established a centre in Brazil, where Chagdud Khadro now lives.

The topic of this talk is the practice of Guru Yoga. The first thing we need to do in this practice is to understand our own motivation for seeking a teacher. I firmly believe — and nobody taught me this but this is my most recent conclusion — that at the Vajrayana level we meet our teacher because we have made very strong aspirations in our past lifetime. At other levels of spiritual endeavour, you would maybe meet your teacher simply according to karma and a certain amount of merit, but at the Vajrayana level, I think we meet our guru because we have really prayed strongly to meet our teacher again and again and again and again. Therefore, it is most fortunate that this has happened here in Melbourne for many of you. For others of you, Vajradhara Gompa also has a great and unconventional guru, unswerving faith on the part of the students, and very rigorous training.

We pray to the infallible lama, our constant protector, and we need to understand what makes a lama actually infallible. This infallibility has two aspects. The first is that the lama needs to know something, or else he or she would have no way to teach you. It does not mean that they have a tremendous expanse of knowledge and many different practices and so forth, but it means that what they teach they know. They have been authorised to teach it, and they know it really thoroughly, and they have confidence in it, and you can rely on it. The transmission is clear and if not perfect, at least very, very precise.

This scholarly aspect has therefore always been emphasised in Buddhism. The Buddhist teachings have a rigorous philosophical basis, as you all know well, and this is of great benefit, especially for those who have the tendency or the acumen for intellectual endeavour. Then there is no end to what you can actually learn. Chagdud Rinpoche tells of one of his teachers, a great teacher in Eastern Tibet, who was totally diligent. He was a Khenpo at a young age but he kept on studying morning, noon and night until he was fifty. And then finally at fifty he said “Well, I still don’t know everything, but maybe I should teach others now.” so then he began to teach others. It is like that, there is no end to what you can learn.

The second aspect of the lama that we must rely on is the lama’s realisation. We, as spiritual practitioners, want to go beyond the intellect, we want to go to profound depths of understanding. This is accomplished on the lama’s part by meditation.

It is these two things together — knowledge and meditative realisation — that are the foundation of the lama. The word ‘lama’ is broken into two parts — la means ‘high’, which refers to the highest realisation in the greatest sense, and ma means ‘mother’, which refers to motherly compassion.

The Buddhist path talks about cultivating the qualities that inspire four types of devotion. This begins with friendship, and you notice that when you approach a lama, most often the lama seems like a friendly guy or a nice lady. So this is perfectly correct, it is perfectly appropriate, this kind of friendly, amiable demeanour. The second feeling that you get, especially from the very great gurus, is compassion. For the second way to inspire devotion is motherly kindness. We feel like we can go to a teacher and will get good advice. We will get wisdom, and we can trust their heart. That is a geiger-counter, that we can trust their heart, no matter what their style is, no matter how unconventional it is. My own teacher has quite a display, but underneath it, close students and also those who are coming closer, all feel that they can trust the heart. The third aspect that inspires devotion is their ability to offer some sort of protection. This is the aspect of power, die aspect of a sovereign. It is like reaching to our own mother for compassion. but we also expect the context of good government so that we are not always threatened.

The greater the lama, the greater this powerful aspect, to the point where they can really turn events around.

So the word ‘lama’ really implies a lot, and we can understand that there are many levels, but anyone who is an authentic lama has the aspiration to manifest all of this. It might be at one level that there’s a powerful aspiration to manifest benefit at the highest level as a great bodhisattva and, ultimately, as an enlightened Buddha.

There are also different categories of lama. People often say things like, “My root guru is this, my root guru is that,” and they feel confused it devotion or a connection starts arising with other teachers. Most people really haven’t found their root guru. To have done so implies a lot. It implies that one has done a tremendous amount of purification practice and has tremendous merit through that; the soil is tilled so that the root lama can, beyond words, beyond intellect and concept, plant a seed of transmission — mind-to-mind transmission. So this is something that is rare to come by.

The categories of lama start with what we call the ‘general lama.’ This includes the kind of teachings I am giving now, such as refuge, bodhicitta, and other general teachings. These prepare one intellectually, they help us to understand the teachings. Then there is what is called the ‘regent.’ This is the lama that literally ushers you into the shrine room. This really means that they prepare your mind for empowerment, whether they actually give the empowerment or not. The gateway to Vajrayana is through empowerment, and preparation needs to be made there. So this is another category.

Then there is the ‘empowering lama.’ To have received empowerment implies that one has had a profound experience within the empowerment procedure. For many people it is possible to have that root lama experience within an empowerment, where suddenly things just open and there’s a full receptivity. This happens because one has entered the empowerment with the motivation to take the empowerment and to practise in order to both train one’s own mind and to benefit others. With that motivation it is possible that a very deep transmission can be made. If the full empowerment has not been received, the empowerment procedure is just a blessing. One is not really fully empowered. But only your close teacher would know that.

Then there is the lama that is called the ‘confession lama.’ I often play this role, when people have trouble with their own teacher for some reason, they come to me because they feel that they can’t talk about it to their teacher. It is very disconcerting to have such a powerful and intimate relationship, for a spiritual relationship is more intimate than a sexual one, it is more subtle, it is more profound, it is more ongoing. It is very big, so when this feeling of discord comes in it is disconcerting, frightening, and sometimes one needs to go to someone else and talk about it.

There is only one thing that one’s confession lama can say in this circumstance. That is that you must purify the relationship with that lama. It does not mean that you have to stay there, but wherever it has become dark and contaminated with negative emotions, and pure view is lost, then it has to be purified. There is no other correct thing to ever say in this situation, because otherwise the person has weakened their own foundation for Vajrayana realisation.

In order to purify the relationship, most of the time people have to just give up their story’. We all have a story for how this friction came about, and we tell this story in all its detail, we rehearse it. we let the tape go again and again and again. The biggest mistake is to tell it to many different people. It is better to save this story, go to the confession lama, and tell it there to a trustworthy friend and lama. And then the lama will say, “This is how you purify.” Vajrasattva is the primary practice, because Vajrasattva said that even the worst broken samaya can be purified. We can therefore have the confidence that through the skillful means of Vajrayana practice we can purify anything. Tibetans say that the only virtue or non-virtue is that it can be purified, and so it has to be.

1 had a sequence of lamas at the beginning of my own path. I had a very, very great lama in the the Drugpa Kagyu tradition, and I had no desire to ever leave that lama, but it was impossible to stay. He could have definitely trained me but I did not have the good fortune of that karmic connection. I had the good fortune of a different karmic connection. The next lama I met was a very wild yogi type, and it would have been impossible for anybody to stay with him. It really is a total blessing to stay with him even a short time.

The next teacher that I met was Chagdud Tulku, but along the way I had the wish to study a particular thing, and so I went back to India and left Chagdud Tulku because I had already made arrangements for this study. I went to this lama and it was immediately apparent that it was extremely uncomfortable there. I was not in the right mandala. All the things that were naturally ‘me’ failed. Normally I am not wonderfully diligent, but not too many people think that 1 am lazy. However, I could not accomplish any work there and did not feel comfortable with the students. The lama himself was saying things about Chagdud Rinpoche that were disturbing, and as I had already made an inner commitment to Rinpoche, I felt a sense of paranoia and darkness and my mind was sliding.

So finally I left and eventually 1 made my way back to Nepal where Chagdud Rinpoche was, and I started to tell him this story. He said, “Don’t tell me this.” He said, “Did you take empowerment?” I said yes. He said, “Did you take teachings?” I said yes. He said, “Well then, keep your view.” And that was that. He was extremely wrathful with me. There was nothing more to say there. Then he actually took a very kind step toward patching it up with that lama. You could never trust them to remain enemies for very long; things change. So that lama ended up helping Chagdud Rinpoche when it was time to come to the United States. That was a good lesson for me.

There is another story along the same lines. It is Photograph by Kerry!

about a group of practitioners in Switzerland. Switzerland is a place of a lot of power, there are a lot of local deities there, it has very turbulent weather. So these practitioners were in a monastery and they had all grown really soured by the experience and were not getting along well with each other or with the lama, who was absent. They all sat around and complained and complained and complained and complained, all except one guy. That guy just did his practice and never complained. One day he got up and he left. Everything was done well, his view- was held well; he left and went to his next Dharma experience. The other guys were left behind complaining and complaining. They couldn’t leave, they were caught in a web of negativity and there was no way to free themselves.

It is our responsibility, once we enter the Vajrayana relationship, to understand the pure essence of everything that arises. One does not rely on or have a lot of expectations in, the outer circumstances arising well. They arise every which way. That crazy yogi lama said, “Whether you are in the Dharma or not, there’ll be sorrow. Sorrow and the Dharma, sorrow and Samsara.” He added, “but the only hope you have of authentic, lasting happiness is in the Dharma.” We can only rely on our own inner view to purify outer circumstances. When we see that our mind is becoming negative and our view is becoming dark and contaminated, like fog on the glasses, then it is our responsibility to drop the story and purify it. So that is what the confession lama does. They tell you to go confess.

Then there is a lama that tells you specifically not to fall into traps of what to accept and what to reject on the Vajrayana path. The Vajrayana vows are themselves not easy to keep. Any time one falls into duality — into judgement, impure view — then you have violated your Vajrayana samaya right there; moment to moment to moment to moment. The mind is really moving around a lot and we fall away from pure view a lot. We get angry and we get judgemental, and while there are certainly rational bases for our feelings and our judgements, Vajrayana practitioners must cut through this. Cut through to the essence, moment to moment. At least we have got to do that.

There are a lot of very specific and interesting rules in Vajrayana that are hard to learn, and seem a little bit inaccessible to us outside of the Tibetan culture. There is a great book actually, called Perfect Conduct, which is a commentary by His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche on all the levels of vows.

Finally, there is the ‘root lama.’ The root lama is the teacher that we have so much faith in that we allow our minds to be open and vulnerable to them. We allow our ordinary perception to just fall away, we trust that it can fall away, and this is not all consciously done. There are many stories of the sudden openings that the root lama produces in a student by providing that glimpse of absolute nature. When you have that experience it arises from faith in the lama, and there is really no turning back. This can come about very suddenly.

In my own experience, of almost all the people who ever came to Chagdud Rinpoche and became his close students, I was really the dullest. I don’t know where I came from in my past lives, but I don’t think there was really anything great there. It is like you just despair of being able to receive the full blessing, you always run into some sort of rocks there, some sort of stubbornness.

Early on, I had an experience with him though. One night he got extremely angry at me; extremely, extremely angry. It was a public thing. It is one thing if your teacher is talking to you in the back room, it is another thing where your friends, and not so much friends, are sitting around listening to this. This was so strong that even surprised the people that did not particularly like me– and I was not very likeable. I had been in the Dharma only a short time and became this really bumptious, rough person right at the centre of the mandala. It was like everybody had to walk past this rock and many people stubbed their toe on it. So even though I was not really popular nobody enjoyed hearing Rinpoche confront me. It was too much.

Rinpoche’s voice is really low and dangerous and he just let me have it. It was like he said whatever he had saved up over many months. I was sitting there and thinking, “What am I going to do here?” and this very slow and lucid thought process started to surface: “I could faint, I could try to get out of here,” and then 1 just realised there was nothing to do. In that moment there was this amazing space, just to be there, opened up — something I had never seen. It was as it the basic space of mind itself opened up. Then it closed over and I managed to get up and get out of the room.

As I was going out one of the Tibetans said, “Don’t you go out and cry, it will be worse after,” but I went outside in the backyard — this is in Nepal — and I cried for about two or three hours until somebody came out to get me. They said, “Don’t you cry, really, don’t do it,” so I poured water all over my face, cold water, and kind of got it together, I was really shaken, and I walked in. I looked at Rinpoche and started to cry again. And he acted just like a big baby; like a bawling baby. He imitated me, “Wa — wa — wa — wa.” It was so funny to see this lama impersonating this bawling baby and both of us laughed.

Then he explained again in a way that I could hear, because whatever he had said to me before was definitely not in my mind any more. He went through it all again and I understood where he was coming from, and that experience of that openness, that spaciousness, did not come again for years. But the faith that it would come, that I would see it again, was really instilled in me. 1 had to practise a lot and go to many retreats, and hear the teachings again and again and again before the obscurations that were so dense in my mind started to lift. Then I was amazed at how patient he had been. It really must be difficult Iron: the lama’s point of view to be with this dense, unpredictably negative person day in, day out, but he survived. Rinpoche’s mantra is, “Keep going, just keep going, you just have to keep going through it.”

Guru Yoga makes the path go so much faster. It you do every single practice as Guru Yoga, it whatever deity you are practising is regarded as inseparable from the guru, then the blessings flow. The guru is the source of all blessings, and they just arise spontaneously by cultivating the understanding that the deity is the guru. If you know this in your practice, then when you see your guru in the times when there are some doubts there and you cultivate the understanding that this is the manifestation of the deity, that will really clarify things. If you see the guru as the embodiment of enlightened intention, and visualise the guru as the deity, that is a very useful understanding.

There is a story regarding Guru Rinpoche and Yeshe Tsogyal and another yogini. It was time to give an empowerment, and Guru Rinpoche manifested as a particular deity with the whole mandala. Then the deity looked at Yeshe Tsogyal and asked. “Do you want to take empowerment from me today?” And Yeshe Tsogyal (she always got it right) said no. The other yogini said. “I’ve never seen this amazing deity before, and 1 see you often, so today I think I’ll take it from the deity.” The whole mandala of the deity dissolved into the heart of Guru Rinpoche and disappeared. There was no empowerment for that yogini on that day.

Everything arises through the agency of the guru. The guru has the tremendously powerful aspiration to manifest these embodiments of enlightened intention according to your needs. They guide the path. They orchestrate the whole thing by producing the empowerment, producing the teachings, producing the meditation instructions that you need along the way. If there are areas of teaching that are better received from other teachers, then they produce that. When retreat places are needed they produce that. All of it is arising as the activity of the guru.

As students, there is nothing higher than to be able to help carry out that activity. To do that well and precisely means that we approach the guru and we are hooked: we have some faith. We start to practise and obscurations start to fall away, merit increases and we gather a deeper sense of who the teacher is and how this mandala arises. We become more spontaneous and are able to move with this more, both in our specific deity practices and our interactions within a sangha context.

As that becomes spontaneous, one is able to be more and more precise in carrying out the Dharma activity of the lama in an accurate way. Every great lama has tremendous Dharma aspirations, and there is activity on some level that is being carried out. If they have had the forethought in their past lives to make those aspirations and to gather the merit to be able to do it, our participation in that vision makes spiritual progress really fast for us. All the merit that’s made in Dharma activity becomes our merit. It is the foundation of our future lifetimes’ activities. This is something really great.

The problem, especially for Westerners, is that we are smart people with a lot of skills and we tend to want to carry over our worldly skills into Dharma activity. That flummoxes tile whole thing sometimes. It is not that the skills are irrelevant or that the skills are not useful, but it we use them with an ordinary motivation the outcome of the Dharma activity is compromised. Many people who enter the activity of the guru feel like their skills and everything are being pushed aside, and they cannot work with the situation. They want to make an offering on the basis of their worldly training and it does not seem to work out well in the sangha context.

I definitely went through that one. I entered the Dharma having come from New York City, working in the magazine field. The last article 1 published was, “Who’s Stopping the Equal Rights Amendment?” It was a great investigative piece and. basically, had a lot to say for a lot of years. Enter the Dharma: back of the room, not speaking at meetings, irritating to everybody. Nothing that I had relied on before seemed to carry over; for quite a few years. When I finally started to move into a more spiritual — or softer, flexible, pliable mode — then Rinpoche could work with me and then everything that I had ever known and had to learn in a worldly professional sense started to come into play.

A lot of people have come to me in these confessional modes who are really frustrated. They feel really shunted aside in the Dharma centre and do not know why that is. If they are women they think it is because they are women. If they are men they just do not get it, “Why doesn’t he work with me?” I think it is a sort of incubation period, because certainly all of our skills and talents are useful in the spectrum of Dharma activity. I found that there was nothing that was a tool that was thrown in the shed and never used again. What I learned to do in ‘the dark ages’ was to check my motivation, because it is possible to look really okay outwardly. I would never look outwardly okay in those years, but later, as I learned to smooth it over, there were many times when it looked okay outwardly. But inwardly I knew that it was not so okay, that I had an impure motivation — competitiveness, power-tripping — it was all there, and I had learned to check that.

That are things that we can look back upon in our own mind, we do not have to discuss them with anybody else, and we can purify that. Especially within the sangha, the whole thing of competition and jealousy seem to arise for no reason whatsoever. It is so subtle in a sangha. It is like wind energy, the mind moves and suddenly it has down a bad avenue. When you watch it you do not have to really find a reason why it went down there. You can just call it back. It gives you a lot of control to know that you do not have to find the reasons.

My clearest memory of that occurred quite recently. I came into Rinpoche’s room when I was on the verge of tottering into depression. I was looking for a peg to hang it on. I could see how I wanted to connect with some external reason so I could just go on a bummer. To sit there and watch my mind doing this, and know that it was me who was going to make the rationale and that I did not have to do that; I could just be depressed all on my own if I wanted to without any reason whatsoever. I did not have to blame something or someone in order to do that. This gave me a sense of really deep power. It was something really great to experience, and I think Rinpoche was aware of that. After I told him he sort of chuckled.

If we really carry the guru in our heart, it we know that he is there (in the heart or above the head, but particularly in the heart) it can be very bracing as we go about our daily activities. We know that if our guru were really there he would not like it. It is good to have that witness — to cultivate the lama as a witness and bring his presence into every aspect of practice.

This is particularly useful for dealing with the mara of false contentment, because there is a lot of wasted opportunity. Australia is a total ‘pure land’, it is easy to see it that way — and there are a lot of ways to waste time here on something other than spiritual endeavour. Really, there is that demon that just says, “You’ve done enough; make yourself comfortable, kick back, take a break.” It is good to beat that one back by the presence of the guru. If you really understand what they have done with their own life, what they have done with their own activity, that is a measure.

Even if we are doing leisure activities there is still the possibility of underlying meditation, of underlying compassionate activity. Nobody has to see us. But the temptation to just tall away from the connection, to fall into some sort of fictitious leisure, this is really, really strong in Western countries. I live in Brazil so it is kind of different there. If one fails there, one falls a long way, and there is nobody to catch you.

It is easy to become angry at the teacher, after you are past the honeymoon stage. For the guru’s job is to take you back down to the ground — cutting through all the hopes and fears, the Attachments and aversions of samsara, and this can be really confrontational. They cannot just let you keep going the way you were going, it is not going to work out. If there is some sort of correction, our tendency is to react and to be angry, and this makes everything a little bit muddy for a while. Teachers, 1 think, really expect that, they know that you are going to react, but they expect us to have the discipline of purifying as well. If you have reacted with anger the biggest fallacy is to then go into a righteous self-pity. In that moment it is really possible that you did not even do anything, but they have seen a pattern. They have waited, they have seen it and there is one more little thing that maybe you do not see and nobody else would see, and they are working with that. So it is confrontational.

It is very important to acknowledge that the anger is there, that the reactivity is there, and really regret that, because that anger will trip you up. It is the cause tor alienation and separation and falling back into the ocean of samsaric tendencies. Also it is important to make a commitment not to repeat that. That means listening really carefully. Finally, one does purification. That is the way we work with samaya. If somebody is in a close guru/disciple relationship, there will be something every day that needs to be purified. It is endless, because your mind becomes more and more subtle in terms of what to accept and what to reject.

At the beginning, you might think that you are a tine presentable person, and then they start to unravel you and it just seems like you are worthless and will never get it right. But what is happening is that you are becoming more discerning yourself, and it you look back then you will see how you have changed, and then when we see your teacher with their own teacher, that is really instructive. How much devotion, how much kindness, how much unstinting generosity they have for them!

Great gurus have the greatest of guru devotion. That’s the hallmark, that’s a measure of a lama, their guru devotion, because anyone who has truly experienced the transmission of mind-to-mind transmission beyond intellect, knows they would not have gotten that it their own teacher hadn’t provided it. That is why tears come to their eyes when they pray to the lineage. There has been so much effort out of compassion and holding of these transmissions so they could be passed on to us today, and really, they are here for us, they are complete. We can get the same realisation that was gotten centuries ago if we have the same diligence,

What we need to do in terms of the teacher to create pure samaya is all things that create merit. We need a good foundation from making offerings, material offerings, offerings of service and offerings of practice. If the lama is sick, or if there is activity being carried out and you really pray and practise to support that, that is making offerings of your own body, speech and mind by training and taming them.

Sometimes we may feel impervious to the lama’s blessing. When our , ‘ own sense of spaciousness is impaired by our preoccupation emotions and intellect, the lama seems really far away. The most powerful way to get past that is to practise; to pray to the lama for the accomplishment of the practice and receive the blessings.

A lot of the time we do all these practice — sending lights to realms, doing tonglen and connecting with sentient beings — all in a really positive way. At the same time, we don’t allow ourselves to receive. We are not soft, we are not receptive, we are impervious; we have the stance of our own ego and we cannot see it. It’s a kind of secret pridefulness really, that we have this self, and this self is up or down on any given day. but it really is like this entity, and then things bounce off it instead of come into it. As long as that is there we are going to feel alienated. We are going to be separate. It you have a close relationship with the lama however, there are moments when it just tails away unexpectedly, and a kind of tenderness, or kindness opens in your heart.

There are many different lineages and different styles of lamas also, and we all have our own affinities with particular ones. Some people really need the Wrathful style, but you can only stand that if you trust the heart underneath it. Then it really cuts through all sorts of nonsense in the mind. Other people are themselves too angry to be able to handle wrath and so a more peaceful style wakes them up.

What can also be tricky is that your own lama’s style might change within the lifetime. That is what I am personally finding a little tricky. You get used to one way and then you need to do it differently, you’re in a different position. That’s tough too. We always want to stabilise. We want the stability, we want to get a routine within the Dharma, and no great lama will allow that. They will pull the rug every single time. It is really comic, actually. You walk in and you have been through this before and they do it just a little bit differently. You experience such reactivity. You can’t believe they pushed that button again and you did it again. We have all seen these cartoons that are like that. It is just really, really … I wish you luck! However, there are also times that your relationship with your teacher just goes completely flat. Everything seems pretty stalled. We have to trust that one too. We feel that this is like death, and we keep waiting for something. Has our relationship been a flat-liner? That kind of thing.

The other thing that we need to do as Sangha brothers and sisters is give room for other people to have their own Guru Yoga style. The lama may be completely peaceful with one person and completely wrathful with another. So another test of your practice is to be able to suspend judgement when he or she is working with a different person and not judge it by your own experience. Do not try to explain it and do not try to step in. You have to have the faith that they know what they are doing when they are working with their student and to give it a lot of room. The priorities change all the time.

There are the kingly practitioners who want to go through the gate to enlightenment first and demonstrate the path. This is perfectly valid. Then there are the boatmen practitioners who want to take people over at the same time as themselves, and then there are the shepherd practitioners who wish to assist everybody else to enlightenment before them. From the Dzogchen point of view, the last one is the greatest of the three. It requires being able to step aside and just say ‘Okay;’ to make your mind at one with the lama’s mind in terms of faith d space and tolerance and non-judgementalism.

So really having the presence of the lama with you constantly is very important. At night, you dissolve the lama into your heart as you go sleep, and in the day you practise with the lama in all of your deity practices. When thoughts arise, you bring them back to the lama, everything is the display of the lama’s mandala. The lama’s mandala and the deity’s mandala are inseparable. Ultimately, when you dissolve everything, all of the effort of the Development Stage culminates into the Completion Stage, and in that moment there can be a complete merging of mind and mind, nature and nature — your’s and the guru’s. It is so expansive, that feeling of spaciousness.