Foundation of the Path by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu

Author:Chogyal Namkhai Norbu
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Dzogchen, Tibetan Buddhism
Publisher: Shang Shung Edizioni
Published: 2005-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

How to Follow the Teaching

Often Western people are a bit strange and think the teaching is like something to take or to steal. As I have already said, they consider the teacher like a cow for milking. Certainly teachers are a bit like a cow, because they give all their energy to enable others to understand the teaching, but there are different ways to use a cow. If we try to get something out of it at all costs and then slaughter it because it doesn’t give any more milk, that is not right. In the Longchen Nyingthig Ngöndro it says that to follow the teaching it is necessary to have three right intentions and to avoid three wrong intentions. The right intentions are: considering oneself to be like someone who is ill, the teacher like a doctor, and the teaching like a medicine. Until the patient has been cured the doctor is necessary. Our illness is suffering and the samsaric condition, and when we realize ourselves then we don’t need the teacher any more. When we take Refuge we take it until total realization, we don’t say we want to take it afterwards as well.

The wrong intentions are: considering the teacher to be like a deer, oneself as a hunter and the teaching as the deer’s precious antlers. In this case the hunter is only interested in the antlers and doesn’t care at all about the deer. Many people have this tendency and think of the teaching as something to steal and to use for themselves. Some people take one method from here, another from there, put them together and then start teaching. But the foremost purpose of the teaching is self-realization. Sure, some people want to help others, but how can they help if they are not realized and they haven’t got any capacity? In that case instead of helping they just create a lot of problems and confusion. How can someone who is ill be helped by another person who is ill and is not even a doctor?

Moreover, the teaching is not suitable for therapeutic activities. The teaching is not a therapy, not because therapies are not valuable but because the teaching serves to discover one’s true condition. Someone who has this knowledge is realized and can help others. If you want you can call this therapy too, but what I mean here by therapeutic activities is opening a practice, doing some advertising and healing people, doing a job that gives a person a living. This is something completely different.

One of Buddha’s names is Great Doctor, menpa chenpo in Tibetan, but this does not mean that Buddha is a doctor who is famous and important. Buddha is called Great Doctor because he is able to cure all our emotions and our samsaric condition, it doesn’t mean he does some kind of workshop with some people, curing them with massage and other things. It is important to distinguish these things well and not to confuse them. The teaching

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