It is now two years since Khandro Tsering Chödrön, the great dakini [female embodiment of enlightened energy] and accomplished practitioner, passed away. The embodiment of utter simplicity and unflagging faith and devotion, she was an inspiration to all who met her whether in the East or in the West, where she spent the last years of her life at Sogyal Rinpoche’s main retreat centre in the south of France.

For the newest post to our series Remembering the Masters, we’re pleased to share this beautiful short video commemorating her exemplary life.

Here is a passage of Sogyal Rinpoche’s unforgettable recollection of her in Chapter 9 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

In a figure like Khandro Tsering Chödrön, the greatest woman master of our day, who was the wife of my master Jamyang Khyentse, you see very clearly what years of the deepest devotion and practice can create out of the human spirit. Her humility and beauty of heart, and the shining simplicity, modesty, and lucid, tender wisdom of her presence are honored by all Tibetans, even though she herself tried as far as possible to remain in the background, never to push herself forward, and to live the hidden and austere life of an ancient contemplative.

Jamyang Khyentse was the inspiration of Khandro’s entire life. It was her spiritual marriage to him that transformed her from a very beautiful and slightly rebellious young woman into the radiant dakini that other great masters hold in the highest regard. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche looked to her as a “spiritual mother,” and always used to say how privileged he felt that of all the Lamas she revered and loved him most deeply. Whenever he used to see Khandro, he would take her hand and tenderly caress it, and then slowly place it on his head; he knew that was the only way he could ever get Khandro to bless him.

Jamyang Khyentse gave Khandro all the teachings, and trained her and inspired her to practice. Her questions to him would be in the form of songs, and he would write songs back to her, in an almost teasing and playful way. Khandro demonstrated her undying devotion to her master by continuing to live after his death in the place in Sikkim where he lived toward the end of his life, where he died, and where his relics are kept, enshrined in a stupa. There, near him, she carried on her clear, independent life, devoted to constant prayer. She read the whole Word of the Buddha and hundreds of volumes of commentaries, slowly, word by word. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche used to say that every time he went back to the stupa of Jamyang Khyentse, he felt as if he were coming home, because Khandro’s presence made the atmosphere so rich and warm. It was as if, he implied, my master Jamyang Khyentse was still present and still alive, in her devotion and her being.

For more videos in the series Remembering the Masters see the following posts:

A Book of Devotion

Memories of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö

Remembering the Masters

For more about Khandro Tsering Chödrön, see In Memory of Khandro Tsering Chödrön and her entry on the Rigpawiki.

During his recent teaching tour in Australia, Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, gave an inspired series of public talks in Sydney and Melbourne.

In this first extract from a talk in Sydney, Rinpoche shares a teaching on the importance of discovering inner peace and contentment––what the Buddha called “the most excellent wealth”––which is in part based on a message from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Though the teachings of the Buddha are vast, and number more than a hundred volumes, Rinpoche explains how they can all be summed up into these four simple lines:

Commit not a single unwholesome action,

Cultivate a wealth of virtue,

And to tame this mind of ours,

This is the teaching of the Buddha.

Other selections from this teaching will appear soon.

For more teachings and information on Sogyal Rinpoche’s schedule, don’t forget to keep checking SogyalRinpoche.org.

[W]hen you meditate deeply on compassion, a realization dawns in you that the only way for you to be of complete help to other beings is for you to gain enlightenment. From that a strong sense of determination and universal responsibility is born, and the compassionate wish arises in you at that moment to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all others.

This compassionate wish is called Bodhichitta in Sanskrit; bodhi means our enlightened essence, and chitta means heart. So we could translate it as “the heart of our enlightened mind.” To awaken and develop the heart of the enlightened mind is to ripen steadily the seed of our buddha nature, that seed that in the end, when our practice of compassion has become perfect and all-embracing, will flower majestically into buddhahood. Bodhichitta, then, is the spring and source and root of the entire spiritual path.

–Chapter 12 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

In this beautiful short teaching on  compassion and bodhichitta, Sogyal Rinpoche explains how arousing in our minds this altruistic attitude towards others’ happiness and well-being brings us great benefit, freeing us of negative emotions and engendering in us ‘an enlightened courage’, the ability to remain in a positive and happy state of mind and deal with whatever problems we may face.

For more teachings on compassion and bodhichitta, please visit our Videos page and the Teachings page of SogyalRinpoche.org.

Of all the practices I know, the practice of Tonglen, which in Tibetan means “giving and receiving,” is one of the most useful and powerful. When you feel yourself locked in upon yourself, Tonglen opens you to the truth of the suffering of others; when your heart is blocked, it destroys those forces that are obstructing it; and when you feel estranged from the person who is in pain before you, or bitter or despairing, it helps you to find within yourself and then to reveal the loving, expansive radiance of your own true nature. No other practice I know is as effective in destroying the self-grasping, self-cherishing, and self-absorption of the ego, which is the root of all our suffering and the root of all hard-heartedness.

–Chapter 12, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Upon the publication of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, now twenty years ago, the introduction and explanation to the western world of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen for training the mind in compassion, had a tremendous and lasting impact on many readers.

In this teaching, Sogyal Rinpoche discusses some of the key points of the practice, as well as it’s deeper significance. To learn how to do the practice itself, please see Chapter 12 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

For more teachings by Sogyal Rinpoche on compassion, see the Teachings page of SogyaRinpoche.org, or the videos page on The Tibetan Blog of Living and Dying.

And for those fortunate to be in Europe, Patrick Gaffney, one of Sogyal Rinpoche’s senior-most students and editor of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, will be giving talks in Paris and Valencia, Spain in the upcoming weeks. For more information, see here.

Here is a rare and precious clip of Sogyal Rinpoche teaching at an informal gathering of the Australian Institute of Transpersonal Studies in Brisbane in the mid-1980s, years before the publication of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

Rinpoche speaks about the importance of the practice of contemplation, as one of the three wisdom tools (listening, contemplation and meditation), which are further explained in Chapter 8.

As Patrick Gaffney recently recalled, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying  was the culmination of twenty years of Sogyal Rinpoche teaching in the West.

So enjoy this short sample of the early teachings that would develop into that great classic of spiritual literature.

Here is the third and final part of the talk we have presenting over the last weeks.

On the occasion of the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Paris in October 2003, Sogyal Rinpoche gave this memorable talk on the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of life and and death to an audience of over 3,000 people.

In part three of this talk, Rinpoche explains how the life we lead determines how we will face death, and he gives precious advice for the moment of death from the great Buddhist master Padmasambhava.

You can find parts one and two of this talk here.

This talk is also available as an audio podcast which you can find on our Audio page.

Here is part two of the talk we began presenting last week.

On the occasion of the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Paris in October 2003, Sogyal Rinpoche gave this memorable talk on the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of life and and death to an audience of over 3,000 people.

In this second part of the talk, Rinpoche shows how it is through meditation that we discover what Milarepa calls ‘the deathless unending nature of mind.’

The third and final part of this talk will be posted in the following week.

You can find part one of this talk here.

This talk is also available as an audio podcast which you can find on our Audio page.

On the occasion of the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Paris in October 2003, Sogyal Rinpoche gave this memorable talk on the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of life and and death to an audience of over 3,000 people.

In the first part of this talk, Rinpoche talks understanding death and impermanence, and how that can lead us to the most important discovery of life, to ‘the deathless, unending nature of mind’, which he reads about from Chapter 3 of The Tibetan book of Living and Dying.

Parts two and three of this talk will be posted in the coming weeks.

This talk is also available as an audio podcast which you can find on our Audio page.

Don’t forget to keep checking SogyalRinpoche.org for a growing selection of teachings from the author of the international bestseller The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying!

Finding Your Balance with the Sky-like Nature of Mind

What happens when you transform your mind through meditation? In an instant, mind ceases being neurotic and argumentative. It becomes totally peaceful. You’re in control, remaining in a simple way of being.

Training in meditation is like learning how to ride a bicycle. Once you know how to keep your balance on a bike, you don’t have to think about your balance any more, because the balance is in you. Likewise, once you have trained in meditation, your mind is in balance.

There is a way to find that balance and go beyond thoughts into the nature of mind. Thoughts are like clouds. Even though the clouds sometimes seem to cover the entire sky, if you take a plane you can go beyond them into a vast space that is never even touched by the clouds. The clouds of our ordinary thoughts are just temporary and changing, whilst the deeper nature of our mind is unchanging, like the infinite space of the sky.

This teaching is from Vigo, Spain, 17 October 2012.

In this short interview extract, Buddhist teacher and author Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, speaks about her first encounter with Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel has studied and practiced the Buddhadharma for 25 years under the guidance of her teacher and husband, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. After meeting Kongtrul Rinpoche in Nepal, she became his first Western student. She has been intimately involved with his work in bringing Buddhist wisdom to the West, in particular to the development of Mangala Shri Bhuti, an organization dedicated to the study and practice of the Longchen Nyingthig lineage.

She is the author of The Power of an Open Question.

Meditation has many levels, but on the most profound level we can say that mediation is using the mind to skillfully and subtly recognize the essence and true nature of your mind.

In June 2009, as part of the events held for His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Amsterdam, Sogyal Rinpoche gave a memorable talk on Finding Peace and Stability in a Troubled World to an audience of thousands.

In this is the second half of that talk, Rinpoche explains the deeper aspects of meditation as a way of bringing the mind home, and how we can bring that simplicity, spaciousness, and humor we discover through meditation into our daily lives and activities.

You can find the first part of this talk here.

Regardless of who we are, the main purpose of our life–you could call it ‘the heart of being human’–is to be happy. 

All of us share the same wish, the same right, to seek happiness and to avoid suffering.

But if we look closely we can see there are two kinds of happiness:

One is based more on physical comfort or pleasure, the happiness of the senses.

The other is founded on a deeper, mental contentment.

In June 2009, as part of the events held for His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Amsterdam, Sogyal Rinpoche gave a memorable talk on Finding Peace and Stability in a Troubled World to an audience of thousands.

In this first part of the talk, Rinpoche talks about finding that inner peace and contentment as the basis for a more-enduring happiness. He then explains these four lines that encompass all the teachings of the Buddha:

Commit not a single unwholesome action,

Cultivate a wealth of virtue,

To tame this mind of ours,

This is the teaching of all the buddhas.

In the second and final part of this talk, which you can find here, Rinpoche continues by talking about the deeper aspects of meditation as a way of coming to know the mind, of working with our thoughts and emotions, of overcoming fear and anxiety, leading us to the only lasting and durable happiness and peace.

When we are really able to rest our mind in meditation, an incredibly spacious, sky-like nature begins to dawn. And from within that sky-like nature of our mind, the sun of our buddha nature shines forth with the tremendous radiance and warmth of love and compassion.

During this recent teaching in Berlin, Sogyal Rinpoche taught on the deeper aspects of transforming the mind and the purpose of meditation.

You can find more teachings about understanding the mind and meditation at SogyalRinpoche.org, as well as in Chapters 4 & 5 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

The Buddha said:

If you look all over the world for someone more worthy of your love than yourself, you will not find another.

In this recent teaching from Barcelona, Sogyal Rinpoche explains that when we practise compassion, we begin by getting in touch with ourselves through meditation, arriving at the soft spot of our good heart.

It is when we come into touch our capacity for kindness and compassion, and come to love ourselves, that we engage in the practice of loving kindness by extending this love to others.

You can find more on compassion and instructions on how to practice loving kindness on page 199 of Chapter 12, ‘Compassion: The Wish-fulfilling Jewel’, in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

For more video teachings on the practice of Compassion, please visit SogyalRinpoche.org

Here is a short extract of a recent teaching Sogyal Rinpoche gave in Paris.

You can find more of Sogyal Rinpoche’s recent teachings as they become available at SogyalRinoche.org.

The most important point is for us to realize our ultimate nature—to purify our perception and realize the essence of our mind.

How exactly can we do this?

There are three ways: through meditation, through compassion and through devotion.

As the great masters often say, the essence of all of the Buddha’s teachings is to tame or transform this mind of ours. When we transform our minds though meditation, compassion or devotion, then what is amazing is that our perception begins to transform. When our perception is transformed, then even outer appearances and circumstances begin to change.

In 2009, as part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the passing of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö, some of Sogyal Rinpoche’s long-time students offered this beautiful short film on “the master of masters”.

Volker Dencks, Barbara Lepani, and Stéphane Lun-Sin, gathering years of research on the life of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö, including journeys to the varied corners of the world to collect testimonies from the masters who knew him, assembled this labour of love and devotion.

In article published in View: the Rigpa Journal in 2009, in a special tribute issue devoted to the life and legacy of Jamyang Khyentse, Volker Dencks and Barabara Lepani wrote of their project and what they learned about this master along the way:

For the past years, a group of Rigpa students has been researching the life of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö. We have delved into the archives to bring together Sogyal Rinpoche’s many intimate recollections of his childhood with Jamyang Khyentse, who raised him like a son. We have scoured the written accounts of other masters and scholars for details of Jamyang Khyentse’s life, and our own interviews with his surviving disciples have taken us to Tibet, India, Sikkim, Nepal, the USA, the UK, France and Spain. Most recently, we have begun to make contact with some of the Chinese Buddhist students who travelled to Tibet to study with Tibetan masters during the time of Jamyang Khyentse. So far, we have interviewed about fifty of his disciples, and others who knew him well.

Our research, which we aim to share more fully in the future, has borne out, again and again, how this ‘master of masters’ was regarded with the very deepest respect and devotion by followers of all of the Buddhist traditions of Tibet. Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö was a legend in Tibet and the Himalayas, but has been less well-known in the western world. Yet what becomes steadily clearer from our research is the huge influence he had on the spread of Tibetan Buddhism not only in the East, but also in the West. We hope in some small way to bring the attention of a wider audience to this extraordinary master, who must rank as one of the greatest saints of the twentieth century in any of the spiritual traditions of the world.

You can read the complete View: The Rigpa Journal article online here.

For more information about this project Remembering the Masters, please see their blog here, which contains some wonderful posts of many stories about the life and times of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö.

This The Tibetan Blog of Living and Dying post is part of a series, also called Remembering the Masters, featuring short teachings and stories about Sogyal Rinpoche’s masters. Further videos in this series will be presented over the coming weeks.

You can find older posts on our videos page.

At times, due to our own history of pain and trauma, when we are faced with the suffering of loved ones and others around us, we may experience that the love and compassion we would like to show them is blocked and inaccessible. How then can we reconnect with our innate capacity for that love and compassion, and our ability to to care for them in the way would most wish in our heart of hearts?

One of the great impacts that the publication The Tibetan Book of Living Dying had was through introducing the wider world to the practice of Tonglen, a practice for developing compassion through taking on the suffering and pain of others, and giving them your happiness, wellbeing, and peace of mind.

Yet as Sogyal Rinpoche explained in Chapter 12, Compassion: The Wish-fulfilling Jewel:

Before you can truly practice Tonglen, you have to be able to evoke compassion in yourself. That is harder than we often imagine, because the sources of our love and compassion are sometimes hidden from us, and we may have no ready access to them. Fortunately there are several special techniques that the Buddhist “training of the mind” in compassion has developed to help us evoke our own hidden love.

In this teaching, Rinpoche explains one of these techniques, that of considering others the same as ourselves, and how it prepares us for the actual practice of Tonlgen which is explained in Chapter 12.

For further teachings by Rinpoche on training the mind in compassion, please visit SogyalRinpoche.org.

When do you hope to be healed, and when do you accept to die?

This is a critical question for many faced with terminal or life-threatening diseases. From the moment of diagnosis, people are very raw and vulnerable. With some illnesses (such as cancer) people feel at times that they might live, and at times they might die, and they go through a roller coaster of hope and fear.

Within such an environment of the mind, coming to terms with the possibility of one’s death can seem like a kind of resignation, and counter-productive to one’s process of healing. But as Sogyal Rinpoche explains in this teaching: ”Accepting and preparing for death does not necessarily mean giving up on life.”

As Rinpoche wrote in the Introduction to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

Jamyang Khyentse is the ground of my life, and the inspiration of this book…Had I not met my master Jamyang Khyentse, I know I would have been an entirely different person. With his warmth and wisdom and compassion, he personified the sacred truth of the teachings and so made them practical and vibrant with life. Whenever I share that atmosphere of my master with others, they can sense the same profound feeling it aroused in me. What then did Jamyang Khyentse inspire in me? An unshakable confidence in the teachings, and a conviction in the central and dramatic importance of the master. Whatever understanding I have, I know I owe it to him. This is something I can never repay, but I can pass on to others.

This video is the second of a series on Remembering the Masters, featuring short teachings and stories about Sogyal Rinpoche’s masters. Further videos in this series will be presented over the coming weeks.

To see the first video in this series, please go here.

A remarkable key feature of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, aw well as all of Sogyal Rinpoche’s teachings, is the frequency with which he invokes the memory and presence of his masters, and the environment this creates through which we can, in some small way, come to meet them ourselves.

From the memorable childhood stories with his master Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö, to the poignant account of Dudjom Rinpoche’s passing (Chapter 9), to the example of embodied devotion in Khandro Tsering Chödrön (Chapter 9), these masters’ presence pervades The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

As Rinpoche wrote in “Introduction to the Revised Edition” (2002), reflecting on the impact of the book in those first ten years since its publication:

As The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying quietly took on a life of its own, moving inconspicuously through many domains and disciplines, I began to understand the ultimate source of its great influence and appeal. These extraordinary teachings are the heart essence of the oral lineage, that unbroken line of wisdom passed down as a living experience over the centuries. Someone once called this book “midway between a living master and a book,” and it is true that both in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and behind it, supporting it with their advice and answers to questions, are the greatest masters of our time. It is their voice that speaks through these pages, their wisdom and their vision of a compassionate world infused by the knowledge of our true nature, the innermost nature of mind. The impact of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I believe, is due to the blessing of the lineage and the vibrancy of the oral tradition. Its popularity has been a humbling experience for me, and it has reminded me that if I have any ability to communicate these teachings, it is only because of the devotion inspired in me by the teachings and the kindness of my masters, and nothing else.

Sogyal Rinpoche with Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

In honor of the lives of these great masters, of the great kindness of the teachings they have left behind, and  in celebration of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as , over the coming weeks we will present  Remembering the Masters – a series of short teachings by Sogyal Rinpoche on each of these masters.

This series will begin with video post on Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö who, in the preface to the book, Rinpoche calls the ‘the ground of my life, the inspiration of his book’.