A Fistful of Sand

  Everybody wants something—meaning, success, peace, recognition, freedom—but wanting alone costs very little. The real question is whether one is willing to develop the capacity required to sustain what they desire. This includes the ability to bear workload, pressure, criticism, and conflict without collapsing or hardening. Life does not bend itself around our values or efforts. No matter how well we believe we are living, or how much good we feel we have offered, we will continue to meet resistance. Something—or someone—will always test us. This is not a failure of life; it is how life functions.   Most people believe the primary obstacle between themselves and what they want is effort, opportunity, or clarity of intention. In reality, the limiting factor is almost always capacity. Desire is common. Endurance is not. We live in a culture that encourages aspiration while quietly discouraging the slow, unglamorous work of self-regulation. We are taught to want more—more succe...

Teaching sometimes feels like shouting “Fire” and people aren’t concerned about the threat. They are upset about the color of the walls while the house is burning. People are more interested in the trivia of life instead of their own safety. We live in a culture of distraction and the architecture of that distractive campaign is obvious: as long as we are distracted from the importance of introspection we are enslaved by sensory stimulation. This is exactly how delusion looks from the inside: fascination with the irrelevant, avoidance of the essential.  (from a talk by Zhikmé Ngakpa Gomépa)   The Buddha used this metaphor explicitly, beings live in a burning house, charmed by playthings. The shock for a teacher is that when you see the flames, you assume people will respond proportionally. They won’t—not because they’re defective, but because they don’t smell the smoke, don’t know what fire is, mistake the warmth of the flames for comfort, or maybe they believe the house ...

When the time came to release him, he didn’t run away in fear. He looked at me, chattered a sound that was not quite human and not quite animal — a sound that meant goodbye . I visited him through the seasons, bringing nuts for him and his companions. In winter he would dart from the branches, always waiting, as if to remind me that love doesn’t vanish when form changes. After ten months he disappeared into the wide green world. That too was a farewell, quiet and complete. It has been two years now. I still visit the squirrels. I still bring offerings. I still think of Matisse every day. He was my teacher, the Buddha of Greenleaf Street. Through him I learned Dharma without sutra, compassion without doctrine, and courage without ceremony. He taught me impermanence not as sorrow, but as participation — that to love anything truly is to let it go again and again, without closing the heart. Sometimes, when the wind stirs the leaves or a squirrel pauses to meet my gaze, I feel him near....

  In Vajrayāna, the tension between form and freedom is the crucible of realization. The practitioner begins within the ritual and vow-bound world of mantra and lineage, yet the culmination of that very path is gomé — “gate-free awareness,” beyond entry or exit. The question then arises: if one identifies as gomépa — a “gate-free one” — does that negate the role of the ngakpa , the vowed tantric practitioner? At first glance, the two appear to stand in contrast. The ngakpa ( སྔགས་པ་ ) is defined by the cords of samaya — the sacred vows linking disciple, guru, deity, and lineage. The gomépa ( སྒོ་མེད་པ་ ), by contrast, seems to stand outside gates and boundaries altogether. Yet these are not opposites, but stages of maturation in the same path — form blossoming into formlessness, fidelity into freedom. The ngakpa is one who practices within structure. He or she moves through gates — initiations, empowerments, transmissions — each a threshold of understanding. Through repeti...

Rohitassa Sutta, Dzogchen, and Pure Land Echoes In the  Rohitassa Sutta  (Saṁyutta Nikāya 2.26), the Buddha makes a revolutionary statement that challenges our assumptions about the world, suffering, and liberation: " In this very fathom-long body, with its perception and mind, I declare is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world. " This “fathom-long body” — roughly the height of a person, from fingertip to fingertip — is not just the locus of personal identity. It is, in the Buddha’s words, the world itself. This is not a metaphor. It is a radical pointing out that the entirety of our suffering and the path to its end is found within our own mind-body system — perception, feeling, intention, consciousness. So, when people say we are in the Dharma Ending Age, that the world is falling apart, we may ask: What exactly is ending? Is the Dharma itself fading? Or is it our ability to see the Dharma that...