Vajrasattva in My Life

I had the great good fortune to attend Fall Festival in France. It was so good I don’t think even French has a word for it – it was beyond magnifique, suprême, extraordinaire …
The empowerment felt deeply powerful (again words fall short), the teachings so very profound. We learned to purify not just negativities, obstructions and downfalls, but also ordinary appearances and conceptions! For the memory-impaired like me, those last two get grouped under obstructions.
But one of the key points that keeps returning is, “I need to purify.” That means me, myself, the person known as “Mimi,” (the name itself reminding me who we’re talking about).

In the last teaching at Fall Fest, we were given specific examples of how we can integrate purification into our daily life, one of the hallmarks of Kadampa Buddhism’s practicality.

You probably know that the options for dealing with negative karma are either to clear them out with purification practice, or to face their results, suffering in one of its multitude of forms. If you don’t get angry when there’s some adversity, mild or major, those ripened potentials will be purified. However,  habitually we get disturbed, irritated, annoyed, rageful … which just repeats the process. 

Sunday at the Temple I had a mild but dramatic experience of an eruption of my negative karma.
* To imagine what happened, pretend that you’re a female human, who of course comes with a female plumbing system (which my mom always cited as proof that God was a man).
Fill up a gallon jug at least halfway with water, although to really get the effect it should be a more impure substance. Thankfully I’m not talking about the other end of the plumbing system.
Head to a bathroom with the jug and start to get into position to release the liquid in your system, represented by the jug.
Before you’ve completely lowered your lower garment, start pouring the jug into your garment and around the toilet. A few moments later, more of the water will go where you intend, but a lot of it will have soaked those clothes. Continue pouring until the jug is empty.
My mind was calm, undoubtedly boosted by the weekend’s teachings, but also disappointed that I couldn’t attend Offering to the Spiritual Guide at the Temple, on Je Tsongkhapa Day, as planned, instead heading home to take a shower (which I think can be transformed into a purification practice if you use the four powers).

For perspective, it’s not that I haven’t experienced some mild, ongoing urinary incontinence, as apparently isn’t unusual for a woman my age (now 52, going on 82), probably exacerbated by cancer/chemo. But this was definitely “over the top.”

Update: As planned, I re-started chemo on Friday (delayed by the trip to France that my oncologist kindly supported). I’m back to the same drug I was on when my doctor stopped treatment in mid-June so that my body, especially my brain, could recover a bit from all the surgery, radiation and chemo I’ve had over 6+ years – on and off treatment but mostly on. That drug, “Gemzar,” mainly had fatigue as a side effect and was effective at reducing my tumors, so I am hopeful that will continue.

Yesterday I got the results of my cancer marker, which has leaped to the triple digits – not as bad as the quadruple digits at diagnosis, but far above the middle double digits I’ve had for years. Prayers appreciated.

* Pee S. Don’t try this at home.

Karma and Reliance

At Summer Festival one of the questions I heard that people were contemplating was the relationship between believing in karma and relying on a Spiritual Guide. The New Heart of Wisdom, which Geshe-la is going to formally introduce at next year's International Fall Festival in Portugal, briefly addresses this question:
"... the effectiveness of our Guru yoga practice depends on the strength of our belief in karma. If it is weak we will neglect to engage in practices for accumulating merit, purifying our negativities and receiving Buddha's blessings, and then our Guru yoga practice will be just empty words."
It hadn't occurred to me that they were related, so I have more thinking to do.
We were also encouraged to think deeply about the many levels in Geshe-la's books, particularly Modern Buddhism, and that imagining we're reading his books in the company of Guru Tsongkhapa will help us discover the deeper meanings.

"Some Other Dude"

Kadam Morten at a Fall Festival review last year explained that we don't need to feel bad or guilty about our negative karma, because it was created by "some other dude or dudette."
Isn't that great? (I heard that some of the English folks attending were stunned, asking each other, "Did he really say 'dude' in a teaching?")
Because most of our karma comes from actions we performed in previous lives, it is as though some other person created them. And yet it is our responsibility to clean them up.
Why?
The karma "they" created is in our mental continuum, and if we want to stop our suffering, we are the ones who need to get rid of it.
In some senses, it was us, but a version of us who's gone. Kadam Morten explained that it's like the scars and tattoos we carry from our reckless teenage years.
Although it's very important that we don't identify too much with the person who did them, there is a connection - a former self, almost like an ancestor.

For me it's helpful to think of parallels between genetics and karma. Before scientists gained the ability to decode the genome, even ordinary people believed we inherited traits from our parents, who in turn inherited them from their parents, and so on, back through generations. We didn't know the mechanism, but we knew there was an association.
Karma is like that. I think part of the reason we don't believe in it is that we don't know the mechanism. (Even though in a lot of cases, we're happy to use things we don't understand - like cell phones, for one. We could simply use the law of karma, but we're skeptical, so we pretend we need logical, scientific explanations for everything.)

Buddha teaches that virtuous actions bring about happiness in the future, when those seed-like imprints in our subtle mind ripen; conversely, non-virtuous actions bring about suffering in the future, when the conditions for those seeds to sprout come together.
By the way, if we keep watering the bad seed, it will continue to grow. That's why in the case of unhappiness, it's so important to know how to turn off the water. For example, when someone insults us, we can choose to retaliate, but in the long term that's only going to make the situation worse. But that's a whole 'nother post.

What is the ramification of believing in karma? You have to be on your good behavior.
If we want to be a decent person, don't we want to do that anyway? Don't you want to help others, or at least not harm them?

In Modern Buddhism Geshe-la explains that one key reason for believing in karma is to "prevent future suffering." Karma is "such good news" as Gen-la Dekyong would say. I'm so happy that there's a mechanism to reduce and finally stop all suffering.
I'd rather be on the hook for my past misdeeds, knowing I can clean them up, than believe that everything that happens to me is random and completely out of my control, and therefore my suffering will never cease.

Funny Karma

Or rather, not funny karma.
It happened again at class last night, as it had at a few Dharma teachings in Vancouver: Whenever some Teachers said something funny, I couldn't hear it - I could only hear the straight Dharma! (But I think I was able to hear everything Gen-la Dekyong said, including the humorous bits.) There must be something many of us do when delivering a joke that puts it out of my hearing range - I think we tend to drop our voices.
When I see the hearing specialist on the 13th, can I complain of my humor loss?

I'm going to take my "pocket talker" to the day course tomorrow to see if it helps. (It's a small amplifier unit that comes with a small microphone, an extendable cord and a jack for headphones.) I learned about it from a Sangha friend whose Mom uses one, in addition to her hearing aid.