THE HUNDRED VERSES OF ADVICE OF PADAMPA SANGYE

MAHASIDDHA PADAMPA SANGYE

TIBETAN BUDDHIST TEACHINGS ON WHAT MATTERS MOST

In the (c 9^th - 10^th) centuries while Western civilization in Europe collapsed “surrounded by darkness and dense gloom" in the Dark Ages and most of the world outside of Asia, was groaning under barbaric conditions and primitive blood lettings; e.g. the Vatican writhing under the whips of degenerates and prostitutes ad nauseam - later termed the “Pornocracy” and "Rule of the Harlots". Mara's henchmen reigned on jammed one-way circular highways descending to hellish realms...Dante's Inferno.

Meanwhile during the same era, the Buddha Dharma Cultural Matrix nurtured and generated countless thousands of Enlightened Masters and a vast Sacred Literature.The Himalayan regions and most of Asia flourished, exalting Humanity.

Untold millions were guided to lives of harmony, culture and enlightened activity - and at their deaths - to realms of higher rebirth and Pure Lands. It was during this era that Mahasiddha Padampa Sangye traveled to Tibet from India and left his mark on Humanity. Past 120 years of age and just before his departure from the earth, he delivered his last Teachings as given here, in the remote southern Tibet village called Tingri:

Homage to the teacher!

Fortunate practitioners gathered here in Tingri, listen!

Just as worn-out clothes can never again be made as new,
It's no use seeing a doctor once you're terminally ill;
You'll have to go. We humans living on this earth
Are like streams and rivers flowing toward the ocean -
All living beings are heading for that single destination.

Now, like a small bird flying off from a treetop,
I, too, will not be here much longer; soon I must move on.

1

If you spend the present meaninglessly and leave with empty hands,
People of Tingri, a human life in the future will be very hard to find.

2

To apply yourselves with body, speech and mind to the sacred Teachings,
People of Tingri, is the best thing that you can do.

3

Give your very life, heart and soul to the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, People of Tingri, and their blessings cannot but arise.

4

Forget your goals for this life - concentrate instead on lives to come.
People of Tingri, that is the highest goal.

5

Families are as fleeting as a crowd on market day;
People of Tingri, don't bicker or fight.

6

Wealth and poverty, like a magic show, just seduce and deceive;
People of Tingri, don't let the knot of avarice bind you.

7

This body's just a bag containing various kinds of filth;
People of Tingri, don't pamper it and spruce it up so.

8

Family and friends are no more real than a magic show;
People of Tingri, in your fondness for them don't tie yourself down.

9

Country and land are like a nomad's pastures
People of Tingri, don't cling sentimentally to them.

10

As parents, all beings in the six realms have cared for you;
People of Tingri, don't relate to them with your ideas of "I" and "mine".

11

The day you were born,  your death began approaching;
People of Tingri, remember: there is never any time to spare.

12

Fundamentally there's no delusion, it's an ephemeral occurrence;
People of Tingri, look at the nature of what it produces.

13

Without distraction apply yourselves to the sacred Dharma;
People of Tingri, after death it will guide you on the path.

14

The truth of cause and effect ensures that actions yield their full result;
People of Tingri, avoid all actions that are negative and evil.

15

Leave all your activities behind like a country in a dream;
People of Tingri, just put non-action into practice.

16

The very thing you feel attached to, let go of it, whatever -
People of Tingri, there isn't anything that you need.

17

Since you won't be staying in this world forever,
People of Tingri, make your preparations for the journey now.

18

If you first finish what you have to do,  you'll never get to Dharma;
People of Tingri, while you're thinking about it, practice straight away.

19

Inside the forest, monkeys may be living happily at ease,
People of Tingri - but at the edges forest fires are closing in all round.

20

For the Benefit of All Beings Throughout Space

Mahasiddha Thangtong Gyalpo (14th century)

For the Benefit of All Beings Throughout Space

Take refuge (first)

On the crown of my head
And that of all sentient beings throughout space
Rests a white lotus and a moon

Upon that is a HRIH
From which appears the Noble Chenrezig
White in color and luminous
Radiating five-colored light rays

Beautiful and smiling
Gazing with eyes of compassion
With four arms, two held together
And the lower two holding a crystal rosary and white lotus
Adorned with silk and jewel ornaments
Wearing an antelope hide over his shoulder
With Amitabha on his crown
Seated with his two feet in the adamantine posture
A stainless moon supports his back
He is the essence of all refuge!

Think that you and all sentient beings are supplicating him together:

Lord with body white, unstained by any faults
With a perfect Buddha adorning your crown
Compassionately gazing upon sentient beings
To you Chenrezig, I prostrate

Recite the above three, seven or as many times as possible.

By the power of having supplicated single-pointedly
Light radiates from the body of the Noble One
Cleansing impure karma, appearances and confusion
The universe becomes the land of Dewachen
The body, speech and mind of beings
Become the perfect body, speech and mind of Lord Chenrezig
Appearance, sound and awareness are inseparable from emptiness.

In this meditative state, recite the Six Syllables: OM  MANI  PADME  HUNG
Finally, remain in the self-nature [state] free from the conceptions of the Three Spheres 

(of subject, object and action).

My body and that of others are the body of the Noble One
Voices and sounds are the Six Syllables
Thoughts and recollections are the expanse of great primordial wisdom

By this virtue, may I swiftly
Attain the state of the Lord Chenrezig
And (may I) establish all beings without exception
In that very same state


Composed by the Mahasiddha Thangtong Gyalpo (14th century)

based on a direct transmission from Chenrezig.

The Four Dharmas of Gampopa

Gampopa Sonam Rinchen, 1079-1153

Grant your blessing so that my mind may
turn towards the Dharma.

Grant your blessing so that Dharma may
progress along the path.

Grant your blessing so that the path may
clarify confusion.

Grant your blessing so that confusion may
dawn as Wisdom.

Advice on Abandoning the Eight Worldly Concerns

MAITREYA THE FUTURE BUDDHA 

Advice on Abandoning the Eight Worldly Concerns
OCTOBER 19 2013 

by Nyala Pema Dündul

A ho! Listen well, all you fortunate, supreme disciples of
excellent karma! 

Gain and loss, happiness and unhappiness,

Fame and insignificance, praise and blame—
These are what we call “the eight worldly concerns.”

Those who cling to the duality of good and bad, and
pleasure and frustration,
Can not even be called practitioners of non-dual self-liberation!

They are bound by the chains of attachment to the
eight worldly concerns.

Whatever happens, whether it appears good or bad,
pleasurable or painful,
Recognize it to be just like the ten similes of illusion!

And, in a state of perfection, transcending the ordinary mind,
and beyond words, thought and description,
Rest in the expanse of the view, beyond the limitations of
hope and fear!

This advice on abandoning the eight worldly concerns,
Was put together by the old beggar called Padma,
For a group of students who had requested it repeatedly.

Through this, may my followers, yogis intent upon enlightenment,
Be free from even so much as a single thought
That is deceived by the mara of the eight worldly concerns!

Translated by Gyurme Avertin and Adam Pearcey, Rigpa Translations, 2013

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I, Kyungpo Naljor,

Feel deep and intense fear

Toward life’s unbearable sufferings

Such an endless wheel of life

Entails immeasurable suffering in life and death

And inconceivable anguish in the miserable realms

I’m not afraid of death

I’m afraid of rebirth !

Khyungpo Naljor (990-1139) Tibet

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His Guru Preceptor: Indian Female Buddha NIGUMA

"When the ocean of samsara is turned over, when all attachment and ego-clinging are totally uprooted, then every place and every thing is covered with gold, forming a golden field of non-attachment. The actual nature of samsara, this phenomenal world, is like a play of dreams and illusion. When you have realized experientially that the play of the phenomenal world is nothing but a dream, or is like the illusion created by some magician, then you have gone beyond the ocean of samsara."

THE WHEEL OF SHARP WEAPONS

YAMANTAKA YAB YUM

  

YAMANTAKA is the wrathful aspect of Manjusri, the emanation of the wisdom of the BUDDHAS. 

YAMANTAKA wrath is directed against selfishness, self-cherishing attitudes, ego grasping and the grasping for true independent existence. 

These ignorant attitudes rob us of our chance to gain Enlightenment, and thus YAMANTAKA wrath is opposed to the Great Lord of Death.

THE WHEEL OF SHARP WEAPONS (Originally published on Axis of Logic on 4/11/04)
 

By Zdzislaw Zmijewski
Sep 1, 2004, 11:59
Editor's Note: We post this reprint of Zdzislaw Zmijewski's The Wheel of Sharp Weapons because of it's penetrating and clarifying relevance to the rapidly developing events we are facing around the world. - Les Blough, Editor

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FEBRUARY 26 2012

This article is re-posted after 8 years with only minor grammatical edits. 

2012 sadly confirms that the noted events below in the dated era of 2004, are now more entrenched and dangerous and Humanity stands on the edge of disaster.

This crisis can not be avoided now...and it will explode with full ferocity and soon.

The eternal battle rages and the choices are clear.

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Perhaps we can assimilate and distill some meaning that could be relevant in understanding the course of events today, by adapting imagery and symbolism from Dharmarakshita’s
The Wheel of Sharp Weapons. 

This is not a polemic against any group or policy. This will not flesh out details of the problems that beset us. It is merely an attempt by one to find out why the cries of children and supplications of the powerless must be so futile. 

Why those that have so much must take it all? Why the yawning abyss yearns to kill all life and love?

If perchance we can find out why – just maybe "the wounded gloom complaining against the light" may yet smile.

In the fearsome jungles of Indonesia 1000 years ago, there lived the sage and adept Dharmaraksita. He was one, to whom disciples flocked from the far regions of Asia. 

Why? He taught a way of mind training that worked to dispel suffering and confusion. This way of mind training still flourishes today. 

His most illustrious student was Atisha from India. Atisha took on the lonely mission late in his life, to revitalize Tibetan spiritual culture, which at that time was seriously disintegrating and corrupted. 

His mission was supremely fruitful and a determinative cause for Tibet’s great resurgence until the destruction by China in 1959.

He wrote of Dharmarakshita: "By showing me these supreme nectar-like teachings, he has granted me sovereignty over the mind."

"These teachings" he is referring to is The Wheel of Sharp Weapons. This text is dramatic, poetic and powerful and quite unlike any other mind training text ever composed.

There is transparency through time and space, which offers no resistance or obstructions to universality & truth. If The Wheel of Sharp Weapons was genuinely valid for as great a being as Atisha – then it should be for us as well.

The obscurations getting in the way arise from our own aversions to clear pondering.

Let us first sip a few drops of this nectar. Below are three of the 120 stanzas:

(12)
When hunger or violent thirst overwhelms us,
This is the wheel of sharp weapons returning
Full circle upon us from wrongs we have done.
Until now, we have kept what we had without sharing;
We have plundered, stolen, and lured people on.
Hereafter let us relieve them from hunger and thirst.

(25)
When those who are close turn against us as enemies,
This is the wheel of sharp weapons returning
Full circle upon us from wrongs we have done.
Until now, we have held grudges inside us with anger,
With thoughts of sly methods to cause others pain;
Hereafter let us try to have less affectation,
Not pretend to be kind while we harbor base aims.

(39)
When attachment and anger disturb and upset us
No matter how much we may try to suppress them,
This is the wheel of sharp weapons returning
Full circle upon us from wrongs we have done.
Until now, we have held on to the improper outlook:
Stubbornly cherishing only ourselves,
Hereafter let us uproot self-interest completely.

In the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, there is cognition of the principle of action and reaction or cause and effect. Action cannot happen in a vacuum or in some willy-nilly reality debased of any common sense, cyclic rhythms or scientific basis. 

In the Eastern traditions, they know it as karma. Western cultures have appropriated the word/concept of karma in the last century. No need to elaborate. Anyone reading this page knows what karma means. 

The master of Galilee has succinctly asserted, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." He pronounced a simple precept with very extraordinary repercussions! 

The Golden Rule exhorted in virtually all the timeless ethical teachings that have sustained viable world cultures, derives its power from the same cognition. 

Dharmarakshita is on firm ground. The principle, some would say law, is a cornerstone of the mind training he offers. 

Another principle reality, inextricably related to the above, is interdependent origination. Many Eastern esoteric philosophic treatises dating back more than 2500 years ago, investigate interdependent origination with deep and subtle analysis. 

We are not interested in that discourse here. However, interdependent origination exerts profoundly resonant meaning for the discussion at hand and the existential foundation that supports The Wheel of Sharp Weapons. 

A simple examination of an ordinary event can illustrate it best. 

Let us observe the Jones family going to Disney World in Florida. They are entering the gate and papa Jones is paying the tab while their children smile with bated breath. 

Let us freeze-frame that for a moment to observe the law of interdependent origination in action. The parents decided to go to Disney World for the day, enthused by the hankerings of their children. 

Is this the primal cause and condition of the event – the originating factor? Some would say – it is. They wanted to go and they went. 

How did Disney World appear in the first place? That is another primal cause and condition. Walt Disney had many dreams – but it took the labors and talents of tens of thousands of individuals to get it through all the phases of planning and construction, not mention the thousands of employees that keep it running every day.

The land upon which Disney World exists is stable thanks to the infinite equilibrium of the sun, earth, atmosphere and oceans just to mention four of inconceivable zillions of geophysical realities. 

We must consider the Boeing 767 that took them from Boston as a major cause and condition for the event to happen. Did the 767 just appear at the gate from the void for their safe passage to Florida? 

Is it in the realm of human calculation to find all the causes and conditions that built the tangible materialization of just that one Boeing 767? Not the least of these would be Adolph Hitler. What?! 

The Second World War rammed the productions of military technology and specifically airplanes with a ferocity/frenzy that was utterly unthinkable otherwise – thus propelling us into the jet age. 

Had Bob Jones not gone to the High School Prom where he met his wife Sally – how could this event originate? 

At the prom, Sally’s unconscious olfactory enjoyment of Bob’s pheromones emanating from his excited nervous sweat, over rode her dislike of his red hair and the rest was history. 

A seemingly whimsical cause and condition without which their three children could never had incarnated to be present for this so ordinary event.
 

Ok - ok, we give up!

Indeed - everything and everyone is interdependent!

Upon examining even the most mundane event, we have to arrive at the realization of the incomprehensible interdependency of all phenomena and events in this world. 

The slightest event is impossible without a universe of galactic majesty in full support of its occurring! 

How we miss the magic of every moment is one of the tragic consequences of viewing things as being really self-existent and independent. 

There are other more tragic consequences – not in the purview of our focus here – though addressed in The Wheel of Sharp Weapons and a fitting subject for a separate disquisition.

Everywhere one looks there is sustenance – just in the viewable realms. Can we dismiss the invisible electro-magnetic spectrum as not party to observable relative reality?

Hardly not. Where the dependency is lacking there is the unknowable non-origination and dependent arising.

If just in the origins of events of ordinariness there must be infinite interdependent causes and conditions constantly at work, what are we to think about the historical swells that sweep millions of people and whole countries in their wakes? 

At such times, there must be crucial causes and conditions that effect so many - so widely and wildy - into maelstroms that overwhelm millions of individual karmas' into collective epochal events.

AMERICA APRIL 2004 SUNDRY VIEWS: 

228 years after the founding of America as a true Republic – crisis and disaster inexorably avalanches with chastening fury and finality over the country …

…this is the wheel of sharp weapons returning full circle upon us from wrongs we have done.
 

The NEW OXFORD Dictionary of ENGLISH:
  
REPUBLIC

- a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
  
No clear-minded and intelligent person can truly say that the United States of America today is a nation in which the supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives.

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PLUTOCRACY:

- government by the wealthy.

…a state or society governed in this way.

…ELITE or ruling class whose power derives from their wealth.

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OLIGARCHY:

- a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.

…a state governed by such a group

…government by such a group.

In the year 2004 the United States of America is ruled and totally controlled by Plutocrats and Oligarchs. Today America is neither a Republic nor Democracy. America is a PLUTOCRACY. It is time to call a spade a spade.

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The Three Branches of the Federal Government:
 

The Presidency of the United States:
...is the Executive Head of the Republic - an Office that serves the people and embodies the deepest yearnings and aspirations of all past generations since 1776 and all the future generations.

In the Oval Office of the White House, sits a man (G. W. Bush) who besmirches the Presidency at every moment. 

Criminal Elites installed this man. 

Now - they can freely go about to destroy the frail remnants of the Republic, rape the Treasury and build Empire in satiating their lust for Power of World Conquest. 

To abuse in every way the Power of the Presidency of the Republic is treason of the most blatant and serious kind. Are the people offended and ready to throw out this scum to restore true dignity and purpose to their Office? 

No !

Instead, we see flag waving and obsequious rallies embracing their depraver. 

How could it get this far?

This is the wheel of sharp weapons returning full circle upon us from wrongs we have done.