Living the View - Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin with horse in Montana

In this video from February 2010 Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin and Ngakma Nor’dzin discuss Living the View and viewing oneself as a practitioner at all times.

Transcript

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: One of the simplest approaches to living the view is to view oneself as a practitioner at all times. It can be very easy to view oneself as a practitioner whilst you are sitting, and to forget all of that once you’ve left your sitting place. But to have a memory of that with you—because most of our practice happens when we’re not practising formally—and to have that be with you – to take it out with you, and to understand what it is to be a practitioner in the world is important.

Ngakma Nor’dzin: I think there are probably different levels of living the view. When we are on retreat with our Sangha—with our Vajra bothers and sisters—then we have living the view at quite a high level: we assume that everybody in that setting has good intention towards us. We enter into the confidence that that’s what that situation is like. So we try to be worthy in that situation and similarly we view the people in that situation that they have good intention towards us. That means that if something is going on in a conversation or whatever, and somebody appears to be not being very kind, we assume that we have misunderstood their intention rather than responding to the apparent unkindness. So we live the view that our Vajra brothers and sisters are realised beings. This creates a wonderful rich creative space in which one can try to live honourably. One can try and live at the very pinnacle of what it means to be a good, honest, honourable human being.

It’s obviously much more difficult to do this in an ordinary everyday-life setting, but I think having had the flavour and experience of this in the sangha setting, one can start to experiment taking risks in an ordinary-life setting. The first thing that we try and do is to assume the best of other people.

A very simple example of this would be when the children were young (they are grown up now, left home, at university and everything), but when they were young there was always this standing-outside-the-school-gate period that happened when you went to collect your children from school – especially at junior school of course; junior and infant school. Now one of the root vows of Vajrayana is ‘never to denigrate the opposite gender’. Often the conversation outside the school gate seemed to be a bunch of women slagging off their husbands—saying negative things about their husbands—and the tendency was that there would be a general, ‘Oh yes, mine’s like that as well …’ And I—from the point of view of my vow—could not join in with this – and from the point of view of my relationship with my husband, didn’t want to join in with this because this was not my experience of our relationship.

So I would try, without the other people feeling put down in any way, to just say something like, ‘Well yeah, but also this…’, or ‘I haven’t found that, I’ve found this…’ and just try and present a more lighthearted view, or try to bring some humour into the conversation, or whatever – just say, ‘Well actually it doesn’t always have to be like that. My experience isn’t that it’s always like that, and does it actually help us all, standing here agreeing with each other about this not-very-helpful view of our husbands? We are in relationship with them, so surely the best thing to do is to appreciate that relationship, not moan about it.’

So this is just a simple example of how you can try and live the view even in ordinary life.

Practice and Ordinariness - Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

Ngakma Nor'dzin

In this video from February 2010 Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ‘ö-Dzin discuss being ordinary and being practitioners.

Transcript

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: One of the most important aspects of what we do is to take our practice into our lives and yet live lives that are pretty much the same as everyone else’s.

Ngakma Nor’dzin: To all intents and purposes we just look like ordinary people most of the time. We wear our robes when we’re ‘on duty’, if you like – when we’re being ordained practitioners: so when we’re teaching, we’re representing the Lineage in some way. But in other ways our lives are very ordinary – we were ordinary clothes ...

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: … and we look like ordinary people because we are ordinary people. You don’t have to have a spiritual organ somewhere in your body in order to make it possible to practice. It actually means that you’re part of the world, but your practice is part of what you do.

Buddhism - the Religion of the Manual Labourer - Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

Chhi’mèd Rig’dzin Rinpoche

In this video from February 2010 Ngakma Nor'dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin talk about the differences between religions in terms of the explanation given by Lama Chhi’mèd Rig'dzin Rinpoche and how Buddhism takes a scientific and experimental approach to practice.

Transcript

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: I very much enjoyed Chhi’mèd Rig'dzin Rinpoche's view because he was able to talk about the differences between religions without making it right or wrong, better or worse.

He would say that Hinduism is the religion of the king. If you want anything you go to the king, and the king will give you what you need. Christianity is the religion of the prince. If you want something you go to the prince, the prince will talk to the king on your behalf and you’ll get what you need. Islam is the religion of the ambassador. If you want something you talk to the ambassador, the ambassador will intercede on your behalf with the king. But Buddhism is the religion of the manual labourer. If you want anything, you have to do it yourself.

So there are different styles of practice. People are drawn to different things. Some people need a God in their lives and that inspires them. Hopefully it inspires people to be better people because of their methods of practice. Buddhism doesn’t have that, which is why Buddhism is not suitable for everybody. But for those people who understand the principles and methods of Buddhism, and feel that they are drawn to that, or want to even experiment with it – because silent sitting and Buddhist practice is like the scientific laboratory of your mind, where you sit and you find out what it’s like to sit. There’s no question of needing faith because you’re faced with direct experience. So you sit and you see what your mind does in those circumstances. Then from there you might find that’s interesting and that you want to pursue that further, and then the whole thing can explode out into the vast array of possibilities that Buddhist practice offers and you find methods within that that are helpful with your own particular condition.

Buddhism and Dharma - Ngakma Nor'dzin & Ngakpa 'ö-Dzin

Ngakma Nor’dzin Pamo

In this video from February 2010 Ngakma Nor’dzin introduces Dharma as a means of discovering the nature of reality: as it is.

Ngakma Nor'dzin: Buddhism a very broad term that covers a huge range of different styles of people and approaches, but all Buddhism has a path and the path is Dharma. From the perspective of our approach, Dharma is translated as ‘as it is’. What we are trying to discover through the practice of Buddhism—through Dharma—is as it is rather than as we think it is, or as it appears to be, or as we have been told it is. It’s (purpose is) to have a direct experience of the nature of reality – so we engage in practices to quieten with the mind and open the mind, so that we can discover the nature of mind. Then, through discovering the nature of mind, we allow that to filter out into our ordinary experience so that then we start to discover the nature of reality through experiencing the nature of mind. So we discover that how things are is not always how we think they are. Perhaps we stop using thought as a means of explaining the world to ourselves all the time. Through experiencing as it is in our meditation, we start to allow the world to reveal to us what it is, rather than laying on the world and experience what we believe it to be.

Meditation is a life skill - Relaxing into Meditation

Meditation is a life skill – like taking exercise or learning how to cook. It is a skill that enables anyone and everyone to live their life more fully and more happily. If everyone meditated for a few minutes every day, the world would be a more peaceful and friendlier place.

Relaxing into Meditation, Ngakma Nor’dzin, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, ISBN:  978-1-898185-17-8, page 4

Simple and direct - Spacious Passion

To engage with the experience of emptiness through the practice of meditation is simple and direct. I begin to recognise the chatter of the mind as superficial. I discover a deep well of stillness that exists

behind the chatter. I begin to recognise the ebb and flow of conceptual mind and the still potential of the nature-of-mind.

Spacious Passion, Ngakma Nor´dzin, Aro books worldwide, 2006, ISBN 978-0-9653948-4-0, Chapter 2, page 34

Is Buddhism a Philosophy or a Religion - Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

Ngak’chang Rinpoche & Khandro Déchen

In this video from February 2010, Ngakpa 'ö-Dzin discusses the question of whether Buddhism is a philosophy or religion.

Transcript

Ngakpa 'ö-Dzin: You can put Buddhism into all sorts of categories and how you’d answer a question as to whether it’s a philosophy or a religion might depend on the purpose behind the question. I think if you are filing books in a library, then you probably want to put them all on the religion shelf. Buddhism has a philosophy, or has several philosophies, and has many methods.

People who define religion in terms of a belief in a god wouldn’t file Buddhism with religion, but in terms of its outward aspects and the fact that many schools of Buddhism are very colourful, very noisy and perhaps does things that are similar to the style of other religious observances, then to be honest you’d say: ‘This is a religion.’ There was a fashion maybe twenty years or so ago of saying: ‘It’s not a religion, it’s a way of life’, but I’m not sure what a way of life is, if it’s not a religion.

It could be seen as a peculiar religion, because there are many things about it that don’t appear to be the same as other religions, but if we had to pick one way of describing it, it would probably be most honest to say that (it is a religion), because when people come into the environment of practice it actually looks a lot like a religion.

It may not have—and it need not have—dogmas or beliefs, because it tends to work more in terms of discovery. So a practice will be indicated and you discover what you discover through that. When you don’t have to believe anything before you start, you just need enough interest usually to get yourself sitting on a cushion and that’s where it begins.

So from that point of view it’s not like a religion in the sense of having to believe a piece of material before you can start. That’s not needed. From there, once we begin to practice, if we find that practice is helpful and useful, we can go further. We can ask questions and we can find out more about it. Then there is an almost infinite wealth of possible things that we could study to find out more about the underpinnings of Buddhism in terms of how it functions. But in practice, we tend to learn about what’s going to be helpful to us or what we are enthused about, rather than learning factual material just for the sake of it.