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My friends arrived, and the kitchen was full. The pizza came out fine. It was not great; it didn’t have a perfect crispy crust, it was a sad cousin to Dale’s pizza, and it will take some practice. My friends, on the other hand, were wonderful. They threw themselves into sprinkling toppings onto crust, cutting the pies, checking the oven, and eating square after square of different pizzas. Full and content, they talked and laughed and sparkled and even cleaned up afterward as a gift to the cook. It seemed like magic, the way everyone loved that imperfect pizza party.

“The real magic,” Brown writes in the introduction to his Complete Tassajara Cookbook, “is that you could grow kind, generous, and larger-hearted in the process of preparing food—because you give your heart to the activity. You are realizing yourself by realizing food. Instead of looking good, you are becoming you.”

Joyful Wisdom

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

All you have to do is look at a picture of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and you’ll know from his smile that he is a joyful man. He wasn’t born that way; in fact, he went through difficult times when he was young. His joy comes from his practice as a young master of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, renowned for its profound teachings on mind called Dzogchen. We may find it hard to believe in the midst of life’s difficulties, but such joy can be ours too.

When I’m teaching in front of large groups, I often confront a rather embarrassing problem. My throat gets dry as I talk, so I tend to drain my glass of water pretty early on in the teaching session. Invariably, people notice that my glass is empty and they very kindly refill it. As I continue to speak, my throat gets dry, I drink the entire glass of water, and sooner or later, someone refills my glass again. I go on talking or answering questions, and again someone refills my glass.

After some time—usually before the teaching period is scheduled to end—I become aware of a rather uncomfortable feeling, and a thought crosses my mind: Oh dear, there’s an hour left for this session and I have to pee.

I talk a little bit more, answer some questions, and glance at my watch.

Now there’s forty-five minutes left and I really have to pee.

Half an hour passes and the urge to pee really becomes intense. Someone raises his hand and asks, “What is the difference between pure awareness and conditioned awareness?”

The question goes to the heart of the Buddha’s teaching about the third noble truth. Often translated as “the truth of cessation,” this third insight into the nature of experience tells us that the various forms of suffering we experience can be brought to an end.

But by now I REALLY, REALLY have to pee.

So I tell him, “This is a great secret, which I’ll tell you after a short break.”

With all the dignity I can summon, I get up off the chair where I’ve been sitting, slowly pass through rows of people bowing, and finally get to a bathroom.

Now, peeing may not be anyone’s idea of an enlightening experience, but I can tell you that once I empty my bladder, I recognize that the deep sense of relief I feel in that moment is a good analogy for the third noble truth: that relief was with me all the time as what you might call a basic condition. I just didn’t recognize it because it was temporarily obscured by all that water. But afterwards, I was able to recognize it and appreciate it.

The Buddha referred to this dilemma with a somewhat more dignified analogy in which he compared this basic nature to the sun. Though it’s always shining, the sun is often obscured by clouds. Yet we can only really see the clouds because the sun is illuminating them. In the same way, our basic nature is always present. It is, in fact, what allows us to discern even those things that obscure it: an insight that may be best understood by returning to the question raised just before I left for the bathroom.

TWO TYPES OF AWARENESS

The essence of every thought that arises is pristine awareness.

—PENGAR JAMPHEL SANGPO, SHORT INVOCATION OF VAJRADHARA,