I was particularly touched when I watched this footage of His Holiness Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910 - 1991) who was a great Vajrayana master, scholar, poet, teacher and head of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism from 1987 to 1991. He was also one of His Holiness Dalai Lama's main gurus.
In fact, every time I watch videos of him, I would start to tear. I did not have the affinity to meet the previous Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche in this lifetime. I wish I did. His teachings have some how touched me. Perhaps I find him endearing because of the way he gave brilliant analogies in his teachings as well as coupled with beautiful poetic flair.
Below are some random excerpts of his teachings I picked:
On true spiritual friends
"Spending your time with true spiritual friends will fill you with love for all beings and help you to see how negative attachments and hatred are. Being with such friends and following their example will naturally imbue you with their good qualities just as all the birds flying around the golden mountain are bathed in its golden radiance."
On devotion
"Devotion is as precious as having a skilled hand that can accomplish all crafts. It is like a great treasure which fulfills all needs, the panacea which cures all illness. Entrust your heart and mind to the Three Jewels like throwing a stone into deep water."
On practising Dharma
"If you truly put the teachings into practice, as the Dharma takes birth and grows in your mindstream, all your faults will naturally diminish and all your positive qualities will spontaneously blossom, just as the sun, as it rises higher in the morning, gradually spreads increasing light throughout the world."
On practising Dharma
"Do not waste a single moment, like a warrior who, pierced to the heart by an arrow, knows he has only few minutes to live. It is now, while we are in good health and in possession of all our physical and mental faculties, that we should practice Dharma."
On faith and devotion
"Without being concentrated by a magnifying glass, dry grass cannot be set alight by the rays of the sun, even though they bathe the whole earth evenly in their warmth. In the same way, it is only when focused through the magnifying glass of your faith and devotion that the all- pervading warm rays of the buddhas’ compassion can make blessings blaze up in your being, like dry grass on fire."
On abandoning attachments
"If we cease to have strong clinging to our body, possessions, and relatives, we will naturally stop feeling aggression toward those we consider as our enemies and compulsive attraction toward those we consider as friends. A true bodhisattva makes no distinction between a person touching one side of his body with a silken scarf and someone cutting his flesh on the other side."
On the absolute truth
"When your realization of emptiness becomes as vast as the sky, you will gain an even greater conviction about the law of cause and effect, and you will see just how important your conduct really is. Relative truth functions inexorably within absolute truth."
On renunciation
"A prisoner locked in jail thinks all the time about different ways of getting free - how he might climb over the walls, ask powerful people to intervene, or raise money to bribe someone. So, too, seeing the suffering and imperfection of samsara, never stop thinking about how to gain liberation, with a deep feeling of renunciation."
On renunciation
"A bedridden patient only thinks about getting well again. He or she has no wish to remain sick forever. Likewise, a practitioner who yearns to leave the miseries of samsara behind will make use of all the ways in which that can be done, such as taking refuge, generating the mind set on attaining enlightenment for the sake of others, undertaking positive actions and so on, with a firm determination to get out of samsara constantly in mind."
On death
"Mindfulness of death is a nectarlike medicine that restores you to health and a sentinel that watches over the discipline of your practice, never letting it stray into distractions."
On emptiness
"Once you have understood the union of emptiness and the dependent arising of phenomena, you will see clearly how deluded and deceiving the ways of the world really are, and, like an old man forced to play children’s games, you will find them very tiresome."
On emptiness
"When sunlight falls on a crystal, lights of all colours of the rainbow appear; yet they have no substance that you can grasp. Likewise, all thoughts in their infinite variety - devotion, compassion, harmfulness, desire - are utterly without substance. This is the mind of the Buddha. There is no thought that is something other than emptiness; if you recognize the void nature of thoughts at the very moment they arise, they will dissolve. Attachment and hatred will never be able to disturb the mind. Deluded emotions will collapse by themselves. No negative actions will be accumulated, so no suffering will follow."
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| The Boudanath Stupa in Nepal was continuously lighted with 100,000 butter lamp offerings near Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche's monastery during the 49 days of his parinirvana in 1991. _(i)_ |
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| HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910-1991) |
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