The lectures presented here were originally delivered by Lama Thubten Yeshe at the Nepalese Mahayana Centre near Kathmandu, Nepal. Lama Yeshe and his chief disciple, Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, established this center in 1969 on a hill called Kopan within sight of the great stupa, or monument, of Boudhanath. Since 1971 Kopan has been the location of regularly scheduled meditation courses attracting students from all over the world, and it was in response to requests from this international group that these Christmas lectures were originally given.2
Lama Yeshe was born in 1935 in a small town in central Tibet.3 At the age of six he entered Sera Monastery, one of several large religious universities near Lhasa. There he engaged in extensive scriptural study and meditational practice under such renowned teachers as the Senior and Junior Tutors of His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Following the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1959 he escaped to India and continued his education at the Buxa Duar refugee camp, where he became the teacher of monks from all four Tibetan traditions of Buddhism, in particular, Lama Zopa Rinpoche.4
Eventually Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche moved to the Kathmandu valley and began their long and close association with Westerners. Since the establishment of Kopan Monastery, upwards of two hundred students annually have been coming to Nepal to receive intensive, supervised instruction in the practice of Buddhist meditation. Upon their return to the West several groups of students have established meditation, study and retreat centers in their native countries so that they might continue their spiritual education in more familiar surroundings. Since 1974, Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche have paid regularly scheduled teaching visits to these worldwide centers, and several of them have already been provided with resident teachers and translators.
Thus, at present there exists an international network of communities studying, practicing and attempting to preserve the living Tibetan tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. The foundation of this living tradition, and the basic subject matter of the Kopan courses, is a set of teachings known as the graded path to enlightenment (Tib: lamrim). These teachings can be traced back in unbroken lineages 2,500 years to Shakyamuni Buddha. They are a direct link with the insights and meditational experiences of the Buddha himself and of such highly realized Indian Buddhist masters as Nagarjuna, Asanga, Shantideva and Atisha.
During his forty-five years of teaching, the sole aim of Shakyamuni Buddha, the Fully Awakened One, was to help beings of all levels of mental development discover their individual paths to the cessation of suffering and dissatisfaction. After his passing, his extensive teachings were collected and eventually written down, and in this way the Buddhist scriptures came into being. In addition, the detailed personal explanations of how these scriptural teachings can be applied to one’s own life were passed down directly from teacher (Skt: guru, Tib: lama) to student. Thus, not only were the Buddha’s words preserved, but the insights they contained were kept alive within the minds of his successors.
At the Kopan meditation courses these scriptural teachings and the unbroken lineages of orally transmitted insights are made available to students in a way that is most meaningful for them. Within a disciplined environment students have an opportunity both to listen to the graded path teachings from a fully qualified lama and to meditate deeply on what they have heard. Discussion groups, question and answer sessions and interviews with the lamas enable them to receive personal guidance, but the emphasis is always on each person’s individual exploration of the mind and its functioning.
Of paramount importance in this exploration is a detailed investigation of one’s motivation: the conscious and subconscious reasons and impulses for engaging in any type of action whatsoever. According to Buddhist thought, motivation is the primary factor determining whether happiness or suffering will result from a particular action. Therefore, the spiritual journey, as outlined in the graded path teachings, is a progression from lower, self-centered motives to higher, more altruistic ones.
Before engaging in spiritual training, a person’s motivation is limited by near-sighted and egocentric views of loss and gain. The individual seeks satisfaction and peace of mind by chasing after the alluring but ephemeral pleasures of the senses, wealth, power, reputation and the like, but the hoped-for gratification of desires remains elusive and beyond reach. In fact, this self-centered striving results only in increased disappointment, insecurity and alienation.
With the realization that objects of worldly desire are unable to provide true comfort either during this life or especially at the time of death, the person is motivated to begin spiritual, or Dharma, training. By understanding the impermanent, changeable nature of things and by seeing the causal relationship between actions and their fruit—that actions done with greed and hostility bring misery while those done with love and wisdom bring happiness—the trainee looks for a source of guidance and refuge and tries to create the causes for his or her future wellbeing.
Eventually it becomes clear that even within the higher, more comfortable realms of existence there is no true satisfaction or comfort to be found. As long as the mind remains obscured by the delusion of separate and independent egohood, it remains bound to the wheel of perpetual dissatisfaction and misery. Thus the trainee’s motivation becomes one of seeking liberation from the whole of conditioned and cyclic existence (Skt: samsara) and achieving the unconditioned peace that passes beyond all suffering (Skt: nirvana).
At an even higher level of spiritual development, the trainee realizes how selfish it would be to strive for personal liberation while all about are helplessly trapped in the mire of their self-created misery. With an unbounded compassion that cannot bear their suffering, the trainee develops the matchless bodhicitta: the motivation to win the full enlightenment of buddhahood and thereby be able to lead each and every being to freedom by means of a buddha’s enlightened wisdom, compassion and skillful methods.
By following this briefly outlined training of the sutra path, it is definitely possible to attain full enlightenment, but only after an extraordinarily long period of time. However, with these sutra teachings as the basis and with an especially powerful bodhicitta motivation, the trainee can enter the diamond-hard path of tantra. By following advanced tantric teachings purely with intense devotion to a fully qualified spiritual master, it is possible to achieve enlightenment—the eradication of all mental defilements and the attainment of all positive qualities—within one short lifetime.
In an extremely abbreviated form, this is the graded path of sutra and tantra taught by all Tibetan traditions of Buddhism.
The Kopan meditation courses on the graded path are generally held in November and are followed by a month or more of supervised retreat and additional teachings. Thus, for many Western students, Christmas is celebrated in a Buddhist monastic setting. Chapter 1 of this present volume, “Giving,” is a series of Christmas lectures Lama Yeshe gave following courses held between 1971 and 1974. Its three sections contain remarks made a week before Christmas, a few days later and on Christmas Eve itself. The question-and-answer section that follows is from an interview given in 1978 at Manjushri Institute in England.
Chapter 2, “Unity,” comes from a lecture given on 27 December 1975 at Kopan following three days of special teachings and ceremonies during which students read from the biographies of Jesus, Buddha and Je Tsongkhapa, the great fourteenth century reformer of Buddhism in Tibet. Finally, chapter 3, “Transformation,” is the translation of a concise teaching in verse on thought transformation containing the core instructions for developing the compassionate mind of bodhicitta.
May this short work be of some benefit to all who read it, and may whatever merit it contains be dedicated to the long life of all teachers showing true paths to temporary and ultimate happiness.
Jonathan Landaw
Ulverston, Cumbria UK
October 1978
Notes
2 This is the original 1978 introduction. As of 2023, the organization the Lamas founded in 1975, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), comprises more than 130 centers, projects and services in over 35 countries worldwide. [Return to text]
3 See Big Love, the definitive Lama Yeshe biography (see note 1). [Return to text]
4 See The Lawudo Lama (Wisdom, 2005), the definitive Lama Zopa Rinpoche biography. [Return to text]
