Who is Dorje Shugden?
Buddhas appear in many forms to help living beings.
Dorje Shugden is a Buddha who appears as a Dharma Protector to help us progress along the spiritual path to enlightenment.
‘Dharma’ means Buddha’s teachings and the inner realizations we gain from putting them into practice.
To follow the path to enlightenment taught by Buddha, we must develop love and compassion for all living beings and then train sincerely in giving, moral discipline, patience, joyous effort, meditative concentration and wisdom.
Our motivation is to become free from all faults and accomplish all good qualities so that we can help every living being find lasting peace and happiness.
When we recite the Dorje Shugden prayer we ask him to protect the growth and development of these precious realizations, or Dharma, within our mind.
That is the function of a Dharma Protector.
The symbolism of Dorje Shugden
How does Dorje Shugden protect the growth of spiritual realizations within our minds?
Because he is the nature of enlightened wisdom, he helps us to identify, reduce, and eventually eradicate our harmful states of mind such as anger, pride, jealousy, desirous attchment, and ignorance.
Buddha called these harmful minds the real enemy of living beings, and the wrathful aspect of Dorje Shugden symbolizes the power of spiritual wisdom to destroy them.
Buddhists never regard other living beings as their enemies. Our only enemies are the inner enemies of the harmful minds that cause suffering to ourselves and others.
The sword held by Dorje Shugden symbolizes the power of spiritual wisdom to cut these harmful minds at their root, and the heart he holds in his other hand symbolizes his enlightened love and compassion. He wears the robes of a monk to remind us that we should always observe pure moral discipline.
In reality, Dorje Shugden is a compassionate Buddha, like an enlightened father who cares for us and provides for us while we are progressing on the spiritual path.
He shows a wrathful aspect only to remind us that harmful states such as anger, pride and jealousy within our minds should not be tolerated.
Protecting all living beings
Followers of Dorje Shugden think of him as an emanation of their Spiritual Guide, who is a faithful follower of Je Tsongkhapa.
Je Tsongkhapa was a great 14th century reformer who restored the purity of Tibetan Buddhism, emphasizing the original teachings of Buddha as passed down through an unbroken lineage of realized teachers. To this day, the masters of this tradition are able to reveal the complete path to enlightenment originally taught by Buddha himself.
In the Dorje Shugden prayer we pray for this pure tradition to be preserved so that all living beings can follow the path to enlightenment and experience lasting inner peace and happiness.
But we do not pray only for followers of Je Tsongkhapa, or even just for Buddhists, we pray for Dorje Shugden to protect every living without exception.
As the prayer says:
Through your skilful deeds of preventing and nurturing,
Please lead all beings into the good path to ultimate happiness.
Some background to the practice of Dorje Shugden
Relying upon Dorje Shugden as an enlightened Dharma Protector of Buddha’s teachings is an ancient, widespread and well loved practice in the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. It is now also practiced by many thousands of Western Buddhist practitioners.
What is a Dharma Protector?
According to Mahayana Buddhism, Buddhas’ omniscient minds can appear in any form they choose to assist practitioners on the path to enlightenment. This is because they have mastered reality, the illusory, dream-like nature of all phenomena. Enlightened beings can appear as Spiritual Guides (in any tradition), as “Dharma Protectors”, as ordinary beings, even as inanimate objects. A Dharma Protector (Tib. Chokyong; Skt. Dharmapala) is an emanation of a Buddha or a Bodhisattva, often in a wrathful aspect, whose main function is to avert inner and outer obstacles that prevent practitioners from achieving spiritual realizations and to arrange all the necessary conditions for their practice.
Who is Dorje Shugden?
Dorje Shugden is a Dharma Protector manifestation of the Wisdom Buddha Manjushri. This means he protects the Dharma of love, compassion and especially wisdom in our minds. His relatively wrathful aspect symbolizes his power to help us defeat the inner enemies of our “delusions”, or negative mindsh as anger, greed and ignorance.
Dorje Shugden’s compassion protects all beings, but his main job is to protect the spiritual development of those following the tradition of Buddha as transmitted via Atisha (982-1054 AD) and Je Tsongkhapa (1357-1419 AD), variously known as the Gelugpa tradition or the Kadampa tradition.
A 400-year-old Buddhist tradition
For 400 years Dorje Shugden practitioners have made peaceful prayers to this Buddha. For example:
“Now is the time to protect the pitiful and protectorless;
Now is the time to protect Dharma practitioners as your children.”
An unbroken tradition of prayer has been passed down through generations of fully accomplished Buddhist masters to the present day.
