Thursday, January 06, 2011

How To Reach A Pure Land

If you have read my previous post "In What I Can Trust" you will appreciate that for me, lineage is important. Also, in previous posts I talk about the importance of "Discontinuity." In this post I talk about the importance of "Continuity."

I entered into the path of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism in the early 1980's when I took as my teacher the great vajrayana master, Khenpo Kharthar Rinpoche, Abbot of Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery in Woodstock, New York. In my early years as a student I was very active in the Buddhist community; I co-founded the Karma Thegsum Choling mediation center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Today, I am not active in the community but I still practice meditation and study regularly. Although I have not seen Rinpoche in many years I still consider myself his student.

Lineage is important to me because I find great value in the teacher-student relationship. I have always striven to be a good student, and a good student requires a good teacher. One outcome of this relationship is that the student eventually takes over the position of his/her teacher. This cycle repeats itself and develops into a lineage. A simple concept really.

Of course, there are many different cultures, lineages, teachings and paths. You might ask, "Why dedicate yourself to one?" Or, perhaps you might ask, "What is the ultimate goal of a lineage?" Does following the practices of a lineage lead one to a certain state of attainment? 

In Buddhism, the idea of "states of attainment" also touches on the concept of Pure Lands and Pure Realms.

I have taken the empowerment for Phowa and took part in a meditation retreat to gain in-depth instruction and practice in Phowa. The Phowa practice is the transference of one's mindstream to a Pure Land. It is usually performed at the moment of death. It allows one to skip the Bardo realm after death and pass directly into a Pure Land. I was instructed in the particular meditation of transference of mindstream to Buddha Amitabha's Pure Land called Sukhavati. That is why I have a tangkha painting of Buddha Amitabha positioned prominently in front of me when I meditate. Therefore, I definitely have a specific goal of going to Sukhavati at the end of this life. After that, who knows? LOL

The core practice is however, to envision the Pure Realm in every moment and situation. This is the enlightened mind shining through into our everyday existence. The Buddha Shakyamuni said, "Nirvana and samsara are one." Ultimately, there is no difference between pure and impure. 

The illusory existence that Buddhism speaks of is the illusion that there is a difference between mundane and supra-mundane, between reality and Pure Realm, between obscuration and enlightenment. If we can break through this illusion we would realize that the Pure Realm is here and now; that there is no reality other than the Pure Realm.

Short of this ultimate awakening of realizing that the Pure Realm is the true reality of here and now, we dream about some day in the future traveling to a destination that is an imagined Pure Realm. We project the possibility of this awakening to another place and time. The paradox is that the enlightened mind realizes that there is no other place and no other time that is more pure than here and now. 

Therefore the future attainment of a Pure Realm is an illusion. Breaking through this illusion is one of the challenges to Awakening.

Obviously we have not attained the Pure Realm completely at this moment. We have not dispelled all illusion and we have not attained ultimate awakening and enlightenment. So we might ask, "Then what do we do in the meantime as we work our way toward this ultimate state?" The answer is that we dream.

Joseph Campbell says that our dream is our personal myth. Each of us have developed our own personal myth and together, we have developed shared cultural myths. Significant personages throughout the ages have shared personal myths that were so highly developed and powerful in their metaphors and symbols that they have become world religions. Thus lineages have been formed.

Therefore, we come full circle back to the original discussion about lineages. My understanding is that a lineage is a mythology, a dream of a destination, shared by individuals seeking to awaken from the dream.

Until that moment when we fully awaken, we live in a dream of dreams, dreaming about a time and place when we awaken from our dream. 

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