The Book which Loves Us all so Much

Fernando Garcia, from Madrid writes: “I met my friend María by chance, as we were coming out of the cinema, and she told me that she was in the final phase of her illness, and that she was receiving a lot of help from an amazing group of students of Tibetan Buddhism. I told her that I had, for many years, been trying to progress in meditation, using a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but was always looking for a master without success. And so she began quite ceremoniously to write the name of a lama and his book on a simple paper napkin.

The next day I went quite eagerly to the biggest bookstore in town, with the paper napkin in my hand, and with the certainty that I was going for the most important discovery of a lifetime. I can’t remember exactly at which point in my reading of the book it was that I started to cry, as I had never cried before, because this book seemed to bring together all the insights, assertions and denials, all the anxieties, passions, sorrows, emotions, all the lives and all the deaths. All the doubts, certainties, questions and answers were like a giant puzzle, where all the pieces that up until then had not had any specific position, finally found their clear and precise place within the endless cycle of the universe.

And this book was giving names to ideas, practices and experiences that I had barely glimpsed before: Impermanence, the View, Wisdom, Compassion, Guru Yoga, Refuge, Tonglen, and the Nature of Mind. It all confirmed the dazzling certainty that I had finally found the Master, the jewel that grants all wishes, the source of a never ending flow of infinite love and compassion, the most important discovery of all lifetimes, and a unique opportunity to prepare ourselves for death in this very life, as Rinpoche teaches us in his amazing Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, this incredibly vivid and lovely book, the book that María loved so much, and the book which loves us all so much.

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