Fri, 03 Jul 2009
Vanished Away
I've been reading the Seventeenth Karmapa's commentary on the well known text, Thirty Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. It's the first book length text by him and what I've read so far is very good. It's a good text to be reading, as Lama Phurbu Tashi is teaching on Mind Training and this text falls into that tradition. The Karmapa tells a personal story in the text that strays from the main topic, but I found most interesting.
One day when I was eight or nine years old, I was reading a text while my teacher was sitting next to me, I was supposed to be studying, but thoughts were crowding round in my mind. I was not thinking about emptiness, as I had not yet studied the major treatises on emptiness and compassion. I was thinking that people died and that once this world has arisen, it ceases, even the deities disappear. As I was imagining these end times, everything vanished all around me. Even objects before my eyes melted away like water. If I looked, nothing was clear. I was so terrified that I began sweating and could not sit still, so I asked my teacher if I could go outside. Not happy with this, he frowned, but did allow me to leave, I ran onto the flat roof near my rooms and walked back and forth while taking deep breaths and this did help. I think if I had not gone outside at that time, I might have gone mad. It was extremely scary.
... Thinking about emptiness as a void can engender a great deal of fear. Consider all the suffering we experience when we do not find the thing we want. How would we feel if every single thing just vanished? The suffering and fear would be limitless.
Lu has been blogging from the annual Summer Retreat at KTD. And today she shared Khenpo Karthar's comments on the recent changes to the KTD Board of Trustees. If you remember, there was a controversy last year when Tenzin Chonyi suddenly fired Byron Coulter as manager of KTD. The change in the board is the outcome of that controversy.
