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.

Robert Thurman

In an Interview, Robert Thurman Shares his thoughts on the Impact of Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

“Dealing with the terrible difficulties of dying or having a relative or loved one die is a really hard thing. And in our culture we don’t do it well.

But we’re doing it better now thanks to Sogyal Rinpoche’s great book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and also thanks to the better knowledge that people are getting from The Tibetan Book of the Dead from my own work and the work of many others. Much of the improvement is also thanks to the work of some of Rinpoche’s students, such as Christine Longaker, who have gotten very involved in the hospice movement.

We all owe Sogyal Rinpoche such as huge debt of gratitude. He has done so much great work, for example in bringing His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Europe again and again. Not to mention the wonderful retreat centre in Lerab Ling, as well as the many wonderful students whose lives he’s helped and touched.

Running down the centre of all of this is his wonderful book, which is still massively popular worldwide in so many different languages. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying has had now a 20-year run and is still going strong, because people are still living and dying! And they live a lot better when they know they’re going to be dying. They are also encouraged by the fact that there are some people in the Buddhist mind-sciences that know something about the death process and the subsequent post-death process, which the silly materialist scientists extremely wrongly and irrationally deny.

Rinpoche’s book—very beautifully and anecdotally—brings this whole process to life for people and makes it less frightening and forbidding. It shows us that bringing this awareness into our lives makes us much more alive and happy. So for all of these reasons we congratulate Sogyal Rinpoche life’s work and also his great book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, now in its 21st year.”

What is your story about The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying? To share it, follow this link: Share your story.

It was the right time.

I was in need of a guide to help me know the main purpose of my life; I always thought that there was something more than what I was actually up to. Reading the book helped me to accept myself the way I was and helped me to accept others as well. I found answers for most of my doubts and questions and it made me realize the mistakes I have been through. Through this I came to know the ultimate purpose of my existence.”

What is your story about The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying? To share it, follow this link: Share your story.

Cristina

Cristina Iglesias from Madrid writes: “In August 2008, my partner and father of my daughter, whose name is Paris, was diagnosed with third stage pancreatic cancer. They didn’t give us any hope, but hope is the last thing there is to lose, and so we started a series of natural treatments and Paris came home with us. Among the friends who were coming to visit us at our home at that time was Carmen, who first told me about The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

I had been interested in Buddhism for many years, and I had read several books, among them the beginning part of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I had abandoned half way through because at that time I could scarcely understand anything the text had to say.

When my friend talked to me about The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I immediately made the connection between the two books, and I told her I would not be able to read it because I had not understood the other one, and because I had to devote my time to Paris’ illness and take care of my daughter Ananda, who was 4 years old at the time.

But my friend gave me her copy, and left it at my house.

Many days went by, maybe even a whole month, and the book was there, closed, in plain view in my house, but I never stopped to read it. I just saw it every time I happened to pass the bookcase.

When it became clear that Paris’ death was imminent, I inwardly reconnected with my vision of death, learned and internalized throughout my years of reading and practising according to Buddhist precepts I had learned. And I wanted to share that vision with Paris, who was afraid of dying and was tormented by ideas of going to hell.

It was then that the book called me. As on many other days, I walked past the place where the book was, but that day I opened it. Just reading the prologue by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I understood that I had a treasure in my hands.

This was confirmed again when I read the first pages of the book where Rinpoche talks about his childhood in Tibet and recounts Samten’s death while he was travelling with Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö.

Immediately I understood that this was what Paris needed: to read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and to listen to Rinpoche’s teachings on the process of dying and the bardos.

I remember that I immediately suggested to him that we should read it together. Paris was Greek and he didn’t read very well in Spanish, and by this stage he was very weak and had trouble focusing his attention. But he asked me to read it for him, so I read aloud to him the parts of the book related to death, and afterwards we shared our insights about them. I am sure that this helped him to go in a much more relaxed and fearless way… and this was, in fact, the way he left us.

After Paris died, I continued reading the book, and I felt I needed to meet the lama who had written it, because every word I read was touching me at the very depths of my being in a very special way. It was as if each and every one of those words were resonating inside me. I connected especially with the parts on death, because for a long time my wish had been to dedicate my life to supporting people in their final days, feeling that it was, along with birth, the most important moment in our lifetime. With my partner’s experience of death, reading those chapters was for me a confirmation of my desires and feelings, showing me in a realistic way that that was the path I had to follow in this life.

Even before finishing the book, looking for a way to reach Rinpoche, I looked at the back of the book and saw that he had an organization called Rigpa. And so I went to the Internet to search, and to my surprise and joy I saw that there was a Rigpa group in Madrid.

Since then, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is always with me, and so is my master, Sogyal Rinpoche, as well as my sangha friends and the Dharma.

I think I can state that, thanks to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I have found my Path in this life. And every day I give thanks for that.”

[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.

Rafael

Rafael Saenz writes from Barcelona: “Here is my story: A friend of mine recommended The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying to me, back in 1993. I was living in New York City at the time. The book had just come out, and it was a big success. I bought a copy, but since I had no special interest in Buddhism or in Tibet at that time, I did not read it for a while. It just sat on my bookshelf. One day—don’t ask me why—I began to read it. I could not stop reading it. I was really astonished by the wisdom and also the beauty in it. When I finished reading it, towards the end of October 1993, I remember shedding tears. ‘Too bad it is a Buddhist book,’ I thought, ‘Religion does not interest me at all.’

But its truth had really shaken me. It was a Friday evening when I finished it. The back pages mentioned this teacher who taught all over the world, and a number to call if we wanted more information. And I thought: ‘Well, if he ever comes to New York it could be interesting to listen to him.’

For a while I hesitated, wondering whether to call or not. It was late on a Friday evening, and I thought that nobody would be at the office to answer the phone. Then I realized that the US office was in California, which is three hours behind New York, and so I decided to call anyway. An answering machine replied, explaining Sogyal Rinpoche’s teaching and book-signing schedule: Saturday and Sunday… New York City.

Baffled by the coincidence that he was going to be in my city the following day, I went to Saint Peter’s Church to listen to him. On the next day I went again, and heard him answering questions from the public. A lady asked: ‘How do you find a master?’ I can’t recall Rinpoche’s answer very well, but I will never forget my own reaction… here is a real Master in front of me!

I asked one of the students about the little flyer that mentioned the meditation sessions on Thursday evenings, and her friendliness and openness got me. ‘Just come,’ she said. At the time there were no courses and very few videos, but I was looking forward to those Thursday night gatherings in a very spacious Soho loft.

In November 1993 I went to my first retreat in California, and then I thought, ‘This is it. This is my master… this is my path.’ As is explained beautifully in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, meeting my teacher was the most important event of my life.”

What is your story about The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying? To share it, follow this link: Share your story.

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.

This sixth episode of The Tibetan Blog of Living and Dying podcast features the third and final part of a talk called The Tibetan Wisdom on Life and Death.

Download audio file (POD_TDLB_20031013PA1645SR_20121214_EX3_3.mp3)

The Tibetan Wisdom on Life and Death Part 3

To download the file, right click the above link and choose Save File As

You can subscribe to the podcast feed through the iTunes store.

You can also find more audio teachings 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.

This fifth episode of The Tibetan Blog of Living and Dying podcast features the second part of a talk called The Tibetan Wisdom on Life and Death.

Download audio file (POD_TDLB_20031013PA1645SR_20121214_EX2_3.mp3)

The Tibetan Wisdom on Life and Death Part 2

To download the file, right click the above link and choose Save File As

You can subscribe to the podcast feed through the iTunes store.

You can also find more audio teachings 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.

This fourth episode of The Tibetan Blog of Living and Dying podcast features the first part of a talk called The Tibetan Wisdom on Life and Death.

Download audio file (POD_TDLB_20031013PA1645SR_20121214_EX1_3.mp3)

The Tibetan Wisdom on Life and Death Part 1

To download the file, right click the above link and choose Save File As

You can subscribe to the podcast feed through the iTunes store.

You can also find more audio teachings 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.