Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [20]
I was blessed with many gracious and wise teachers who generously shared their spiritual legacy with us. Tibetan lamas like Venerable Kalu Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Dudjom Rinpoche, Kangyur Rinpoche, and Tulku Urgyen generously taught me the Dharma. In opening the great highway to enlightenment for me, they emphatically showed me that it is open to anyone. In fact, probably the most essential thing they taught me is that the Dharma is waiting for anyone who wants to start on the path to awakening. We each only have to find a Dharma gate that suits us as individuals.
Whether you are male or female, Westerner or Easterner, young or old, it doesn’t matter; there are an infinite number of Dharma gates, and they are easy to find. Rick Fields, the first American historian of Buddhism, wrote a poem called The Mantra of the Goddess and the Buddha. In it he writes:
Be your breath, Ah
Smile, Hey
And relax, Ho
And remember this, You can’t miss.
FINDING YOUR OWN TRUTH,
YOUR OWN DHARMA GATE
You don’t have to be a card-carrying Buddhist to long for spiritual insight and guidance. My Indian guru, Neem Karoli Baba, always admonished us to learn from everyone. No one has a corner on the market of truth. “All one” was his favorite maxim. He encouraged me to serve and apprentice myself to all sages, seekers, and saints, no matter what their denomination or belief system, for it is the heart of the matter that counts—the living spirit, not just the letter, of the law.
The traditional elder, Kalu Rinpoche, once told me that he didn’t believe that a seeker who had ties to Christianity or any other faith had to convert to Buddhism in order to practice Dharma. The truth, after all, belongs to anyone who cherishes it, lives it, loves it, and is committed to it.
Some 2,500 years ago, the Buddha left his wife, his infant son, his home, his family, his extraordinary royal wealth, and his safe, secure, and luxurious life. When the Buddha put on a mendicant’s patched ochre robe and began the life of an ascetic monk, he renounced a great deal. Dancing girls and succulent food served on golden plates, not to mention love, human attachments, and the power and prestige that came with his role as a crown prince. As a young man, the prince was known as Siddhartha Gautama; as an adult, he would be called Shakyamuni, the Sage of the Shakya Clan, or Lord Buddha, the Blessed One.
Before the Buddha’s birth, seers told his father, the king who was head of the Shakya clan, that the child who was about to be born would either be a very powerful king or a fully enlightened one. According to their prediction, the Buddha could go one of two ways; it was one or the other. No easy choice. At the age of twenty-nine, the Buddha chose the life of a wandering monk because he wanted to understand suffering and the end of suffering; he wanted to know more about life and death, and he wanted to detoxify, to purify his body, mind, and heart from delusion and destructive emotions. In short, he wanted to know truth and find inner peace and freedom.
The Buddha renounced a great deal in the name of truth. Yet in some ways it was a much less complicated process for him to make his decision than it would be for a man or woman living today. The average young parent, for example, couldn’t contemplate leaving a child as the Buddha did to begin a spiritual path. Unlike the youthful Buddha, few men or women today would have the assurance that all the child’s financial and wordly needs would be satisfied. In traditional Buddhism, there used to be only one way to walk a sacred or holy path. That way involved decisive detachment from the world. We have a mental picture of ascetic monks, carrying their alms bowls, walking or meditating along dusty Himalayan pathways. Can you imagine someone doing that in America or in Europe today for any length of time?
Jack Kornfield, a spiritual teacher and author who returned from Thailand in the mid-1970s as an ordained monk, started out by begging in New York City for his sole daily meal, lunch, as he had been trained in Thailand