The Third Teaching: Mindfulness

There are many ways to help unravel the confusion of the mind. A basic quality which is extremely useful for us all to develop in this lifetime is what is traditionally called mindfulness. Normally, whenever we do something, we are thinking of many other things at the same time. I will give an example. There is a Vietnamese monk called Thich Nhat Hanh who talks about washing dishes in order to wash dishes. Normally when we have a sink full of dishes, our

thought is that we will wash these dishes, then we’ll get clean dishes and they will be out of the way and then we can do something else. And so when we wash the dishes we are trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. While we’re washing the dishes we are thinking of something we did in our

childhood, or something somebody said yesterday, what we’re going to do later in the day, or what our spouse said to us yesterday and what we should have said back, or we worry about the children or the financial situation in Singapore, whatever. What we are not thinking about is the dishes.

Now this would not be so important a point, except that the next thing we do, which might even be something nice like having a cup of coffee and biscuit, gets the same treatment. We sit down to drink the coffee, but after the first sip we are thinking about something else again. “Oh god, now I’ve got to go

upstairs, then I’ve got to do this, then I’ve got to go shopping, what should I buy” And so it goes on and on, right? We are never present with what we are doing in this moment, and life just goes by. Even when we are doing something really nice, we appreciate it the first moment, but you watch the next moment the mind’s gone off somewhere else, comparing it with something else we did before.

I like Tirimisu very much a spongy cake with coffee and lots of cream totally degenerate, but I love it. So when I eat Tirimisu, it is a very pleasurable thing. At the first mouthful, I’m completely with the Tirimisu. But by the second mouthful, I am comparing it with a Tirimisu I had somewhere else which

was my idea of the perfect Tirimisu, and I’ve lost this one. For the rest of the mouthfuls, I’m not really eating it anymore. It’s eating itself. I’m already somewhere else, with former glorious Tirimisus which this one should have been but isn’t.

We do this every day, not only with what we think of as unpleasant things like washing the dishes, but also with pleasurable things. We’re not there. We don’t experience it. Even if we’re speaking about it, we’re just giving our version, our ideas, our opinions, our memories, our likes and dislikes. But the thing itself is lost.

So Thich Nhat Hanh says that instead of washing dishes to get clean dishes, we should wash dishes to wash dishes. In other words, we just wash the dishes because there they are. And while we are washing them we are completely with what we do. We know we’re standing at the sink, we feel the water and the soap

suds. We are conscious of every dish that we wash. We’re just completely here. He says our mind is like a bottle on the ocean, being slapped up and down in all directions by the wind. But we are centred, completely centred. We experience what we are doing, we know we are washing dishes.

Now for any of you who have tried this, you would have discovered that it is extraordinarily difficult. It sounds very easy, but after the first minute the mind is already either thinking, oh this is easy, very easy to be mindful, I can be mindful anytime, chatter, chatter. And where are you? You’re not with

the dishes, you were just thinking about the dishes. Or else you were doing dishes being mindful and “Why did I get that dish? Oh, I remember, my mother-in-law gave me that, yes, that was part of a set, I wonder what happened to the rest of the set.” Right?

It is extraordinarily difficult to remember to be present. It’s easy to be present once we remember. But if we do that, if we bring that quality as much as possible into our daily life, it’s as if we are seeing things for the first time. Life sometimes seems very boring and repetitive because we only live it

at second and third hand through our interpretations, elaborations, ideas, memories, likes and dislikes. We don’t see the thing in itself. So the Buddha said that mindfulness was like salt in the food, it makes it tasty. Food without salt has no taste. Our lives are like that. That’s why people have to have

more and more exciting things now louder music, brighter lights, more stimulation, because life has no taste. So we have to come back into the present and add a little salt to our lives. That salt is to be aware, to be conscious.

Mindfulness is a huge subject and I’ve only skimmed the surface. But try to bring that quality of knowingness, of being present and knowing what we are doing while we are doing it, as much as possible into your life without interpretations, elaborations, and ideas. Just being naked in the present, in the moment, that alone can really transform our lives. We become much more centred, we become much less easily angered or irritated, we feel poised in the midst of situations and not as though we’ve been buffeted here and there.

We see things more clearly, especially people. We are able to pick up not just their words and facial expressions but somehow we become more sensitive to the situation, to what is appropriate and what is not. And if we really continue this, we gain a kind of inner space, so that we are no longer completely

thrown up and down by our thoughts and our emotions. We are able to see that we are not our thoughts and emotions. Our thoughts and emotions are mental states which rise and fall, but that is not us. We’re able to connect more with that which knows. For this reason the Buddha very much emphasized that everybody should cultivate this quality of attention, of being present in the moment.

If you spend your days cultivating loving kindness, compassion, tolerance, ethics, non-harming, honesty, integrity and mindfulness, I think you will have a pretty full day and no one will complain then that they have no time for practicing dharma.

Questions and Answers

This talk was mainly in the form of a Q&A session in which Ven Tenzin Palmo addressed questions about Tibetan Buddhism, her life in the cave, and her current efforts in establishing a nunnery in India.

Q. Society has some problems with the idea of a person spending twelve years alone in a cave meditating.

A. My first thought is that such a person must be terribly psychiatrically ill to choose to spend time in that way. And it makes me wonder if perhaps our asylums are full of people who would be better off sitting up in caves.

Q. Do you think that if you had not made that escape and had stayed in London, you might have been institutionalized?

A. Well, no, I don’t think people who know me think I’m a psychiatric case! No. But more important is the second part. “Cave in the Snow” was written for a very general audience, not specifically for a Buddhist audience. It’s been read by many people who are not actually Buddhist. I have received letters from

people who relate that when they were young sometimes children, sometimes adolescents ,they spontaneously underwent very profound spiritual realizations. These completely turned their ordinary understanding of the world and what is important, what is not important, what is real, what is unreal, absolutely

upside down. Because they were not inwardly prepared for this, they were thrown into a state of great crisis, made much more difficult by the fact that all the people around them thought they were crazy. They explained what they had understood to their parents, or to their priests, their teachers and everybody said no, this is madness.

Because of this great split between what they realized about the nature of the ego, about the nature of the self, about the nature of what we perceive outside as actually being merely a moment-to-moment projection from our interior being, some were actually hospitalized because they couldn’t cope, because

society around them was saying, “You’re crazy”. They were not able to deal with their insights because of this extremely unsympathetic environment around them, while all the time within themselves they knew this was really true. It was only when they became adults and began to read books on Eastern spirituality that they suddenly realized, “Now, wait a minute, I was right all along!”.

In Asia, someone who has this sort of experience will then go immediately to find a teacher and learn how to understand their insights and how to integrate them into their lives. So yes, there are definitely psychotic states, there are definitely levels of psychiatric problems too, it doesn’t mean that

everybody who is locked away should actually be sitting in a cave. But some should. On the other hand, if you are psychiatrically unbalanced, probably the worst place for you to be is in isolation. You actually have to be pretty balanced to stay by yourself.

One time I went on pilgrimage to Nepal for the winter and this friend of mine a six foot two yoga expert, a big strapping guy said he wanted to stay in the cave. He stayed a few weeks and then he had to go down to the village. He couldn’t take the isolation. He said it was like heaven and hell, but mostly

hell. And the state of my cave when I got back! So I would say actually it is not a refuge for those who cannot deal with society. The great meditators of the past have always been people of great inner balance and sanity. More sanity than the society, which is one of the reasons they chose to go away!

Q. How do you meditate for that long every day twelve hours a day for twelve years? The second question is, could you tell us a little bit about the practices? They seem to vary so much from very simple practices to highly specialized practices like tummo (the yoga of inner heat).

A. Well, of course they belong to the Tibetan tradition, which is almost regimented. You usually have four periods a day of formal practice which last for about three hours, so you end up with twelve hours. Normally, one would get up long before dawn. I would usually get up around three in the morning and do the first practice. Then, tea or breakfast, whatever, then another session in the morning, then lunch, then a break and then another session in the afternoon and then another session in the evening.

Normally in the Tibetan tradition, there are two main systems or streams. One kind of meditation is that which is directed upon the mind itself. This is the kind of meditation most people think of when you talk about meditation. They start by just being with the breathing in and breathing out and when the mind quietens down, they turn their attention onto the mind itself. Because if we think about it, we are normally always directed outwards to what we see, to what we hear, to what we are thinking.

We are very involved in and identified with what we are thinking and feeling. I feel happy, I feel sad, I feel enthusiastic, I feel impressed, I feel jealous, I feel angry, I think this, I like that, I don’t like that, my opinion is this. We believe it, right? We are very identified with it and we are

completely in the midst of it. So this type of meditation is to stand back and look at the thoughts and the emotions as merely mental states which arise, stay for a very short time, and then disappear to be replaced by something else. Waves on the ocean of the mind. And then once one has begun to understand what the thought or the feeling is, then one turns that attention back onto the knower itself. To know the knower. So this is one kind of meditation.

The other stream of meditation which was developed in India and then taken into Tibet is called tantra. Tantra makes use of very elaborate visualizations of various Buddhas, Bodhisattvas or deities, either in a peaceful or wrathful aspect. This is to make use of a faculty of creative imagination, but it’s a

very structured creative imagination. It’s not arbitrary; nothing is arbitrary. Every single little jewel is documented exactly how you see it, how the deity appears. And so one trains one’s mind and then lights go out and lights come in. It’s like an internal movie which is going on. This is not just to train the mind in knowing how to visualize. These images spontaneously arose from enlightened minds in the past, and by replicating these visualizations we

are able to access extremely profound levels of the mind which are not accessible to an ordinary lineal kind of consciousness. At deeper levels we think in images and so because these are images coming from an enlightened mind, it helps us somehow. It becomes a conduit to opening up very profound inner levels. This really is true you have to take my word for it.

Q. When you are doing this, do you focus on the different chakras as part of the meditation?

A. Well, the first part is to get the visualization. Then, when the visualization is stable, it goes onto the second part which has to do with the chakras, or different psychic centres of the body, the manipulation of the energies and this kind of internal yoga which is called tummo. Tummo is for generating

inner psychic heat and this again is because in inner yoga we all have certain inner psychic channels where the prana or the Qi flow, especially through the central channel. But this is blocked and cut off. This is one of the reasons why our minds are so wild, so undisciplined and full of anger, greed and

delusions because the inner energies in the body are out of balance. They are not flowing in the channels which they should be flowing in, they’re flowing in other channels. And so these inner yogas are for opening up the inner central channels and causing the pranna or the Qi energy to enter into the central channel. When that happens, it undoes the knots in the various chakras and then spontaneous insights or realizations occur very quickly.

Q. At the heart of the visualization did you use any physical movements to help?

A. Well, they use pranayama, they use visualization, they have special exercises which they do. So with all that, you see, it takes up a lot of the day. The days pass very quickly.

Q. Did you know this before you went up, that you were going to spend twelve years there?

A. No, I had no idea. I had already been living for six years in a monastery there. I wanted to find somewhere quieter and more conducive to practice, because the monastery was just too socialable. And so when we found this cave, then my thought was just to go and do some practice. I had no idea how long

I would stay there. One year led into another led into another. And I sometimes would stand outside and think, “Well, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you want to be?” And I couldn’t think of anywhere else I wanted to be. Then I thought, “If you could do anything in the world you wanted, what would you want to do?” and there was nothing else I wanted to do. So I stayed. It was very nice.

I mean, yes, it was difficult. There was six months of winter and you had a lot of snow and the cave got soaking wet and there was this and there was that, but so what? It was so beautiful and so silent. The people were very supportive and my lama was not so far away. It was a valley which was very blessed it

had a very special quality. I wanted to practice and it was the perfect place to do that. One was very safe. There are not that many places you could point to where a woman can be isolated and feel completely safe. So I realized that this was a unique opportunity to be there, I was very lucky to have the good karma to have arrived in such a lovely place, why move?

Q. Did you have any contact with your parents at all at that time? It must have been very hard for your mother.

A. Well, I wrote to her in the summer. Of course during the long months of winter I couldn’t write because it was cut off. Not only was it snowing in Lahoul, but on either side of the Lahoul valley there are very high passes which would be blocked. The main pass into Manali is blocked usually from November to July. So I would write her in the summer and in 1984 I went back. I hadn’t been back for eleven years so I thought I should go back to see her before I started my final three year retreat when I wouldn’t be coming out or writing letters.

Q. How did your letters get out of Lahoul?

A. In the summer there was traffic there were even buses. It’s only that it was for a short period. Then, once snow falls, that’s it. In the spring, they would have runners men with mailbags on their backs who would run over the pass.

Q. When you actually began the search and began some of the practices, did you ever feel stupid? Did you ever feel that you would never get it, that it was awkward? Did you ever think, “I’ll never get there?”

A. Yes. I think everybody has difficulties. I don’t know of anybody who just sits down and gets it, unless it is a very great lama who’s been doing it for many lifetimes.

Q. But never to the point where you thought that this was a useless quest?

A. No. It never seemed useless. I might feel I was useless, but not the practices, no.

Q. How to know when you meet somebody what they were in their previous life? You met your lama again after he died, as the 9th Khamtrul Rinpoche. Were you convinced as soon as you met him? Was there an “electric spark”?

A. Yes, my lama died at the age of fourty-eight in 1980, and then he was reborn by the end of the year of 1980 and we brought him back to the monastery when he was about two and a half. I met him when he was nearly three. I arrived in Tashi Jong and I kept making excuses to put off seeing him; I had to

take a shower first or I had to do this, I had to do that. I was putting it off because I felt very nervous about meeting him again. And also I was convinced that when he saw me he would think “Who’s this strange-looking nun?” and burst into tears and then I would feel upset. I kept thinking, ‘He’s just a little boy don’t worry if he goes “Arrgh!!” and runs for cover.”

When I went in to see him he was sitting on his seat, just sitting there, with his hair all in a little top knot. I started prostrating and he looked at me and then he had this big smile. He started laughing and laughing and he said to his assistant monk, “Look, that’s my nun, that’s my nun!”. He jumped up.

“It’s my nun, it’s my nun!” And then he started giving me fruit and toys and we spent the whole morning just playing together. What can I say? You know, the way he would look at me. Sometimes we would be playing and suddenly he would look at me exactly the way the previous Khamtrul had done, exactly the same look in his eyes as if he looked straight through my eyes. I don’t think there could be any doubt. He was three years old. If anybody came to see him

(and people were always coming to see him) he would drop what he was doing and just go sit on his seat, and give them fruit and a blessing. If they stayed for hours he would just sit there perfectly calm. When they left he would say, “Have they gone?” “Yes, Rinpoche”. Then he would get back down and start playing again. Then when somebody else came in, he would just drop his toys and go sit down.

Q. What did you do for another lama teacher after he passed away? Did you need to find another teacher?

A. Well, as it happened, my second teacher after Khamtrul Rinpoche was His Holiness Sakya Trizin, who is the head of the Sakya. He was giving a three month teaching and initiation on something called the “Path and its Fruit” which is the main Sakya teachings. He had asked me to come for that. That was a year

after my lama had passed away, so through that, I got myself re-established with him again as one of my teachers. Also in Tashi Jong which was my lama’s community, there were many yogis and other incarnate lamas who have been my teachers.

Actually, although Khamtrul Rinpoche was my lama, he didn’t actually teach me very much. He would say you should do this or do that, you know, I’ll give you the empowerment for such and such, but he himself didn’t usually specifically sit down and say this means this, this means this, and then you think

that and then you do this. Other people would do that. He was just there to indicate where I should go. When you start, you go to the lama and say, “Rinpoche, what should I do?” But as the years go on and I gained more inner confidence in what my path was, then I found myself going to him more and more

and saying, “Rinpoche, I am thinking of doing so and so, is that all right?” And then he would say, “Yes that’s OK, I’ll give the empowerment and go to so-and-so to get the teaching.” You begin to get your own inner guide. By the time he left us, I more or less knew what I was doing and where I was going. For other people who had only just met him, it was much more traumatic in that sense.

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about your nunnery?

A. I lived in Lahoul which is a Buddhist Himalayan valley, next to Ladakh. The nice thing for me in Lahoul while I was there was that there were both monks and nuns. They shared the same monastery. Everybody had their own little house, but nonetheless it was very obvious that the nuns were the ones who did all the work and the monks were the ones who did all the rituals. While the monks were out front doing the rituals and getting the teachings, the nuns were in

the back doing the cooking. The nuns were basically household servants. So I felt very sorry about this because many of the nuns I met were actually very bright and intelligent girls.

I will give you an example. One of the nuns in our monastery was a girl named Zangmo. She had come from a very good family. Her family wanted her to get married and arranged her marriage, but she said, “No, I want to be a nun.” They said no, no, no, you must marry so-and-so it’s a very good connection for

our family. She had very long thick black hair in plaits, and the night before the marriage, she got a pair of scissors and cut it all off. It’s not like here where you can have nice short hair and nobody cares; in Lahoul you cannot. A woman’s long hair is her pride and glory. So when her family saw her with short locks, they said, “All right, you win.” So she became a nun and went to stay with a very lovely Tibetan lama who spent much of his time in Lahoul,

Pangi, and Ladakh, teaching the border regions which most Tibetans ignore completely. He really revived the whole meditation and practice tradition there. He was a wonderful lama.

And so Zangmo went to stay with him. She had given up a lot. She was from a wealthy family and she could have been the lady of the house in her new home. But what was she doing with the Rinpoche? She was in the kitchen doing the cooking and taking care of the children. She lived with him for 10 years and

travelled all around with him, but she got practically nothing as far as teachings were concerned. And yet any ragamuffin in a male body that came in off the streets would be given all the deepest, most profound teachings and set down to do a three year retreat. And when one sees that, then one thinks no, there’s something not quite right here.

Recently I saw a video about a nun from Ladakh, which used to be part of Western Tibet. Now it’s part of India, next to Kashmir. This Ladakhi nun is trying to arrange teaching programmes for nuns, so she arranged a week’s teaching programme on monastic rules. And they did a video of this and one of the old nuns in the video said, “I have been a nun for forty years and this is the first teaching I have ever received.”

So this is the situation even though you get bright girls who are very keen, very devoted, it’s as if there’s this brick wall. It’s not the same in the Chinese tradition, but in this tradition it is like that. What we’re trying to do is to create a nunnery and an institution for girls, especially from the

border regions like Ladakh, and Lahoul, Keylong, Spiti, Nepal, even Bhutan. They all belong to the same tradition that I belong to. There are various traditions in Tibetan Buddhism, but our tradition for some reason is spread along this border area. What we want to do is to create the facilities so that

girls can come and study philosophy, be educated and also learn English. At the same time, they will be taught meditation practice and the emphasis will be on practice also. My hope is that in the future some of these girls will be able to go back to their own places and regenerate what’s happening there. Things are changing. I’m not the only person that’s doing this sort of thing. There are now nunneries starting where nuns are studying philosophy and

they’re doing debating which is the Tibetan method for studying. They have opposing partners and they debate philosophical questions. They took this method of learning and sharpening the understanding from the ancient Indian universities. But traditionally women didn’t do that; it wasn’t considered lady-like. It wasn’t considered that women needed that.

There are social obstacles. I once asked my lama Khamtrul Rinpoche why there were so few female incarnate lamas. In the Tibetan system, they have this method of recognizing the reincarnations of great lamas, like the Dalai Lama being the 14th Dalai Lama. When a great lama dies, then they look for the reincarnation and almost all of these are males, with one or two exceptions.

I asked why there are so few female tulkus. He replied, “Look, when my sister was being born, she had more signs at the time of her birth than I did.” These signs include rainbows appearing and water in the offering bowls turning into milk, slight earthquakes these are signs at the time of birth which

make people think something special is coming. Everybody said, “Oh, what’s coming?” But then when she was born as a girl, they just said “Whoops, mistake”. Even though whoever she was, she didn’t have the opportunity to study, to meet great masters, to be encouraged on the spiritual path in the way she would

have had if she had been a boy. So that’s why we didn’t come back in female form, because socially there were so many more obstacles to pursuing the spiritual path and even if we did come back we weren’t recognized.

Q. I’ve been very curious about the Karmapa debate. I saw this movie at the Singapore Film Festival. A Finnish man spent about three years making a movie about the two Karmapas, the two boys. The Dalai Lama is interviewed in the movie, and he says that there is precedent for simultaneous reincarnation. Can they simultaneously reincarnate?

A. Yes, yes, many lamas do. My own lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche, we know has at least two incarnations. One is in Darjeeling, one is with us.

Q. And it is not a huge controversy?

A. No, not at all. The one in Darjeeling looks exactly like the previous one. And the people in Tashi Jong all say how extraordinary it is because it’s just like being in the presence of the previous one.

Q. Why do they reincarnate simultaneously?

A. I asked Khamtrul Rinpoche, “How do they do that?” And Rinpoche said, “Well, ordinary people like you and me cannot do things like that because we still believe in an ego.” And as long as we believe in an ego, in someone who is doing what we do, who is thinking our thoughts, it creates this one stream of consciousness which then will be reborn again and again, but usually just in one stream. When we have realized the truth of non-self then there’s nothing to hold it together. Then the wisdom mind takes over and it can emanate infinitely in order to help beings, in many different realms, not even just in the human. But in many forms, some will be recognized, many will not be recognized. You’re no longer held together by this idea that there is a “me”.

A. Can I ask how are you doing with the fund raising for your nunnery?

Q. Well, our major step forward was finally finding the land I have been looking for it for the past 6 months. The area is very beautiful. If any of you have been to Himachal Pradesh where we are, it’s a very lovely part of India. Sometimes people think of India as just heat and dust and lepers and,

nowadays, pollution. But our part of India in the north west is very nice. It’s hills, snow mountains in the distance, streams and trees, and it’s very pretty. Because it’s so pleasant and Kashmir now is undergoing so many traumas, many people are looking to Himachal as being the next ideal holiday spot.

Many people are moving into the area and so it’s becoming rapidly built up. It’s still empty by Himachali standards, but the villages are getting bigger. People from the Punjab are coming and buying up land. So it was quite difficult to find land which was close to my lama’s monastery.

By the way, I should mention that I’m doing this nunnery because the lamas asked me to do it. This was not my idea. First of all many years ago Khamtrul Rinpoche said, “I want you to start a nunnery.” I just said “Yes, Rinpoche” and the subject was dropped. Then about five years ago, the high lamas in my monastery said, “Look we don’t have a nunnery, this really is a lack, will you please start a nunnery.” I thought, “Yes, you’re right this is what I have to do.” So they are very supportive.

I don’t want it to sound as if it’s us against them, it’s nothing like that. The lamas and the monks have all the way through been extremely supportive. They’re always offering their help, saying, “Whatever we can do to help let us know, we will help teach the nuns, we will help train them, we will do whatever we can.” I just wanted to mention that.

So we were looking for land, and the monks also have been looking for land in the area. Every time we found a nice piece, it would be too small and usually there are other Indian villages nearby. Now Indian villages are extremely noisy and one has to look ahead ten years, by which time five houses would have expanded to fifteen or twenty. So this is not suitable, because apart from the nunnery, we’re also going to have an international retreat centre for women, where women from all over can just come and meditate in whatever way they wish.

In India it’s very difficult to find a place which is quiet and safe if you are a woman and want to go away and do your retreat. So I needed quite extensive land in order to build the nunnery, the nun’s college, the nun’s retreat centre and an international retreat centre, plus a small clinic for the local people and guest houses.

Just before I came to Singapore, I was walking at six o’clock in the morning and someone said to me, “Well, there’s this land over here, go have a look. And there it was, basically. It’s actually a hundred acres. I mean we can’t afford to buy a hundred acres, but we could buy forty five. It’s a pine forest

surrounded by Indian government forest land so it’s extremely quiet. There are no villages. It just leads to a kind of precipice and behind it are the mountains. There are the towns and villages two kilometres down the road.

The owner wants to sell half. But nowadays prices have gone up a lot, and so to buy even forty five acres of land, it costs four thousand US dollar per acre. This is forest land, not agricultural land which is more expensive.

Q. If this nunnery had existed when you were thirty-three, do you think you would still have gone up into the cave or could you have found the same thing there?

A. By the time I was thirty three, it’s possible. I became a nun when I was twenty one and at that time, especially, I really wanted to go into a nunnery and be trained, but there were no nunneries. Oh, it would have been wonderful if this nunnery existed at that time.

Q. Can we talk about the Togden and the Togdenmas? Are you interested in preserving that special heritage?

A. In our monastery, which is called Khampagar, there are a group of yogis who are monks. They have monastic ordination but they have dreadlocks and instead of wearing maroon robes, they wear white and in Tibet they lived in caves. You know, it’s really difficult for me to talk about the Tongden,

they’re so much a part of my heart, but its difficult to express why. I think if I had any inspiration in my life it was the Togdens. Anyway, they are very special. They basically spend all their lives in retreat. Even when they’re not in retreat, still they’re carrying on their practice. They really are very great practitioners like Milarepa, following in Milarepa’s tradition. One recently died, but now we have three of those and seven in training.

Now, in Tibet my lama also had a nunnery with four hundred nuns and within that nunnery, there were also the female form of these yogis. They were called Togdenma and they were like the Togden. They wore the same kind of dreadlocks and the same kind of robes and they also lived in caves behind the nunnery. As far as we know, none of these survived the cultural revolution. But people who met them before the Chinese takeover say that they were really very extraordinary. They were famous throughout Tibet for their qualities.

When I was young about twenty-three I told my lama that I wanted to be a Togdenma and he was so happy. He bought this long silk kathag. In those days most of these long white scarves were made of cheese cloth, but he went out and came back with a long silk one and he draped it around my neck and said, “In

Tibet I had so many Togdenma and now I don’t have even one. And so I really pray that you will re-establish the Togdenma tradition.” And then he told the Togden and they said, “Great, send her along to us. We’ll train her. Then the lay people and the monks heard about this and they said, “No way a girl is

going to live with our Togden. Forget it.” So I never could do it, because it’s the kind of training where you really have to be with your teacher. They really have to watch you moment to moment to see how you are doing, and there are certain mind things for which you need to be in a very conducive atmosphere. For example, at a certain point you’re supposed to say and do what comes into your mind.

Q. So are you saying that it’s dangerous?

A. It’s dangerous and also difficult to practice except in an environment where you have sympathetic people who know what you’re going through. And so I could never do that. But still my aspiration is to re-start this tradition again. If I myself can’t do it, never mind. At least I hope somehow we

can be the tool, the instrument to re-introduce it. It’s a very precious female lineage, unique in the Tibetan tradition. There isn’t anything quite like it anywhere else. And it’s something which is passed on from person to person, not just something read in books. So as a mind-to-mind transference and also

a transmission, you have to have living embodiments to pass it on. When I said to the Togden that I wanted to do this, their comment was “OK, great, but you better be quick because we are not getting any younger.” The youngest one is sixty five.

Q. Do you set goals for yourself in terms of achieving Enlightenment, or do you not try to do that? Is it just going to happen if it’s going to happen at all?

A. I especially try to talk to Singaporeans about this one. Don’t set aims, don’t set goals. Your whole life is already one set of aims and goals, and that’s why you are so stressed out. Don’t do that in your meditation, don’t do that in your spiritual practice. Just do your practice because it’s a nice

thing to do. If you go into retreat, go into retreat because what could be nicer than to be in retreat and have lots of time to do your practice? Just enjoy doing the practice for the practice, whatever results come or don’t come will just happen. But as soon as you start making aims and goals, then you’ve already created this big obstacle and it just becomes another ego enhancement. So I think the important thing in any kind of practice is just do it to do it.

Q. How important is it to have a teacher?

A. That’s such a difficult question. Obviously, the very best is if you do find a genuine teacher, someone that you can be with a bit and get actual guidance from and so forth. Obviously that is the very best situation. It’s as though we’re trekking in an unknown region. If you’re by yourself, even

though you have guidebooks and maps, you still have to be very careful because things don’t look the same on the ground as they look on the map. And if you make a wrong turn you’re likely to end on a precipice or down a cliff and so you have to go very carefully. You’re likely to make a lot of wrong turns and

waste a lot of time and there’s always this hesitation, especially if you encounter things and wonder what do I do now? People get very frightened. If you have a competent guide who knows really what is what, then you can just go ahead. They say, “Go right”, and you go right. Obviously it’s much easier. You’ll be much more confident if something comes up that they will know how to deal with it. They will understand what it is, you have that

confidence. So it’s obviously much quicker and much more foolproof. The problem is finding a teacher. And in the meantime to sit around waiting until the perfect teacher appears while not doing anything from your side would also be very counter-productive. There is a lot we can do for ourselves with the help of books, with the help of talks, and with the help of our common sense.

Q. Is there something that you would have us take away from this meeting with you?

A. I think that we are in this world apart from anything else to really cultivate the mind on many levels and to open up the heart. And anything we can do which helps us do that is a good thing . We all come from many different backgrounds. We each have such very different histories, not just in this lifetime but in many lifetimes, so we are all coming from very different places. And in this lifetime we all have very different lessons to learn and different experiences which we need to undergo to help us to grow.

If one considers us all as like little children, then what we are trying to do is to mature. And all of us are maturing at our own rates. Certain experiences will mature one person and not another. So it’s not that everybody has to do things the same way, or this is the right thing to do and this is

not the right thing to do. For different people at different times and in different places, there are infinite amounts of experiences which have to be undergone, and some things which don’t need to be undergone at all.

But the goal is to really understand the mind, to bring clarity into our mind and to learn how to tame our untamed minds, our wild emotions, our wild thoughts, to really begin to understand our inner life and to cultivate the mind and to make the mind increasingly clear and full of genuine understanding. Along with that, to open up the heart with loving kindness and compassion, so that we really do experience the happiness and suffering of others, that we’re not just trying to make ourselves happy and cozy in this lifetime. That’s very important.

Dogs and cats have the same idea to make themselves happy and cozy in this lifetime. There’s more to it than that. The fact is that we are human beings. We should use our human potential and not just slip back into being glorified dogs and cats. Do you understand? I mean, all animals want to be comfortable,

they want to have nice food, they want to have sex. We always know what is the most comfortable chair in the house because that’s where the cat’s sleeping. It’s a tremendous waste of the human life to just devote our lives to that level. We have such great potential. If we think just being comfortable will bring us happiness, then we are very mistaken. Our happiness really lies in bringing happiness to others, so in whatever sphere of life we may be, we can all do that.