The Importance Of Seeing Your Guru As BuddhaLama Zopa RinpocheThe file attached is a teaching of Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Disciple Detong translated it into Chinese in order to share the teaching with others. She asked me to review her translation. I had reviewed and revised the Chinese version. In addition, there were a few typos in the English version, so I also corrected those. I find the teaching very good, so I send it to all of you. As a disciple, one must regard one's guru as an enlightened being. Even if the guru does not regard himself as an enlightened being and claims that you, as his disciple, gain buddhahood before him, you must still show respect and pay homage to your guru. For instance, the fifth Buddha - Maitreya, who now presides over Tushita pureland, enlightened before his teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha. To show respect for his guru, Maitreya has a stupa on his forehead. In the same way, Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion of all the Buddhas, in his eleven-headed aspect, has on his crown his teacher Amitabha Buddha, the one who presides over Western pureland. So learning from a guru or spiritual teacher should not be the same as killing a deer, extracting its musk and then discarding its body. Even after attaining enlightenment, one must continue to honor one's guru for without him realization is simply impossible. The ability to see your guru as identical to Buddha depends on your motivation of developing bodhicitta - the pure wish to become Buddha yourself in order to be able to benefit other sentient beings. If your mind is strongly motivated in this way and always thinks of enlightenment and the means of achieving it, you will naturally see your guru in the same state because nothing else will be in your mind. The more you wish to attain buddhahood, the clearer you see the need for seeing your guru as Buddha. We need to train ourselves to see our guru as Buddha; otherwise, even if your guru is Buddha, you will not see him as Buddha. For example, all the compositional phenomena are impermanent, but you do not see them as impermanent, it is then difficult to meditate on impermanence to realize things as impermanent. In the same way, all the things we see are empty of inherent existent, but we do not see it that way, then we need to put tremendous effort to meditate in order to gain realization of emptiness. So the faults are within us, not out there. Source: Edited upon request by Detong: Yutang Lin [Home][Back to list][Back to Chinese versions] |
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