Buddhas of the Future

 

Buddhas of the Future

Fully enlightened people - mahasiddhas - of the future will be normal laypeople with jobs and families. They won't look any different from other people and their lives look the same as everyone elses, though internally their minds are entirely different from those of other people. But isn't it lovely to realise that finally being fully enlightened, being a buddha, being a mahasiddha, looks exactly like you do. Wow!!!

Kim Thubten Lingpa, 18.11.2021

Living Buddhas in Amrita Mandala Sangha (updated 1/2024)

 

Living Buddhas in Amrita Mandala Sangha (updated 1/2024)

Dear Amrita Mandala Sangha and Friends,

Today I have the pleasure to tell you that twenty-one (number updated 4th of January 2024) people has finished their purification process (bhumis 1-10). In other words, these people have reached what in buddhism is known as ”exhaustion of all phenomena”. In other words, they have attained buddhahood*.

*buddhahood and mahasiddhahood are used synonymously in this text. This refers of realising the emptiness of all phenomena, i.e. attaining perfect wakefulness for the sake of all beings.

 

Read more from Buddhas Among Us - Accounts From Westerners Who Attained Full Enlightenment, downloadable for free from our website.

Face to Face with Buddhanature-video in youtube

Thank you for reading.

Blessings of clarity and love to all,

-Baba

 

See also: 

• Claims of Enlightenment Made by Ancient Dzogchen Masters
  
• And Then... Buddhahood Was Attained
• Harvest is At Hand
• Long Cessations: How Buddhahood is Actually Attained
• Claims of Attainment by Jesus, Yuthok and Naropa
• Shakyamuni Buddha Claims to Have Attained Buddhahood
  

 

 

Pemako – The First School of Western of Vajrayana Buddhism

 

Pemako – The First School of

Western of Vajrayana Buddhism

I went to take a look at the pemakobuddhism.com-website, as I haven't done that in a while. I've been low key with writing and other computer projects for a while so I was surprised to see all these things, like 2PF, bhumi model, few books, RBY, long list of tantric deities, dzogchen metta, trauma therapy, pure land meditations, ceremonies and vows, list of preliminaries etc... so many things!

How in the heck have I done all that!? And when!? It feels weird to think that I've done all that. And there's an international sangha of 70 people from all corners of the world, monthly retreats and so on. Bonkers!

It's been a long road, I can tell you that. It hasn't been easy but when I die, I'll die a happy man without regrets. Since my karma ripened and I connected with dharma practice at the age of 23, I've put everything into it, not holding back, and it has carried me well, like a mother carries her baby. At some point I was asked to teach by my gurus and people who wanted to learn so I started teaching full time in 2008. That's over 12 years ago and I don't know... few hundred courses and retreats ago. It's been a long haul, a long god damn haul... That's what it took to get the first school of Western vajrayana buddhism up and running... That's not too bad.

All this sends me back down the memory lane... All the people I've met, all the silly mistakes I've made, all the childish ideas I had about enlightenment, 3½ years of burnout, thousands and thousands of working hours without pay, all the abuse and ridicule aimed at me, all the laughter and tears with my beloved dharma friends and students, all the heartache and pain, all the release, all those hundreds and hundreds of opened and perfected bhumis! What a ride... What a thunder!

But I fucking did it! I did exactly what was planned before I took voluntary rebirth into this body. I remember the time before my mind attached to the fetus inside my mother's womb. I remember leaving the world of the mahasiddhas, pure lands and subtle planes, where mahasiddhas wished me a good journey. That was 43 years ago. I just turned 42. Oh god, how I miss my home, those pure lands and planes of many eternal friends, masters of the mahasiddha family. Oh, and Mahasiddha Family! That's on the website too!

Earth is a samsaric realm, a war planet as some yogi called it. It's a hell of a place. A ruthless grinder! But I feel proud to say that I've done this work with so many people to give samsara a hell of a fight! That is what we have done and that is what we keep doing at Pemako! I won't have it any other way.

Now, I feel as if I have started my retirement. No doubt, it will be easier, a smooth and enjoyable ride from now on.

Oh, may the perfume of wild rose dharma caress the noses of all sentient beings... May the blessings of the buddha within strike all beings like thousand thunderbolts!

A Ba Hu Mani Peme Hung Hrih

Kim

Pemako Buddhism: Western Vajrayana Pioneers

Pemako Buddhism:

Western Vajrayana Pioneers

Q: I again come to expectations and concepts, how a buddha should be and behave. Like it would be an automation that fully realized buddha would be teaching, doing charity and so on.

Kim: We, Pemako buddhists, are pioneers and the West is the ground where we have arrived to our pioneering work. There has been mahasiddhas before but not outside the cultures of the East (not known at least). Honestly, I think that, we are the first ones on this hemisphere getting close to buddhahood and eventually becoming mahasiddhas in this life, the first ones within just few years from now, based on divinations and the present stage of a handful of our practitioners.

Already for couple of years, half of our sangha members have achieved stability of rigpa or knowledge of oneself as a buddha. I've spoken about statistics and details on many occasion before so I won't get into that here but people new to this should read What's Next? On Post-Awakening Practice, which gives you a clear and practical sense of this, what to newcomers and outsiders might seem like an outrageous claim. So anyway, it's a completely new thing what we do here in the modern West. Also, Pemako Buddhism is the only non-Eastern lineage of vajrayana to exist. There simply are no others, as all existing lineages of tantra have come from Tibet, in most cases. So we are doing groundbreaking work, like pioneers who roam to new lands, build roads and villages for others to come. In the wider perspective of history this has been done many times before but in our time and culture, it hasn't been done.

There is not a single person existing who grew up in the West and became a mahasiddha. I think we might have to go back 2000 years to find such a person in Jesus Christ but since then there has been nobody, although there has been many monks, nuns and hermits in the Christian tradition.

Looking at the present Western world, there is no one out there who had life experiences like ours because no mahasiddha ever grew up and practiced in the modern West. All available accounts and biographies of yogis and masters are all Eastern and if you start reading them, I at least, always found something to relate to but mostly something I couldn't relate to. I didn't grow up in buddhist culture riding yaks, cooking food on fire, living in tents. I grew up in a modern secular society, watching Sylvester Stallone movies, getting drunk in bars as a teenager, experienced depression, anxiety attacks, wasn't married (twice) by my parents and so on and so on.

To live in 21^st century wealthy Western society is very very little like the past cultures of the East. Pretty much the only similarity to Eastern people of the past, is existential confusion, dukkha. So, we just have to do the work ourselves and trailblaze, come up with our own stories of authentic seeking, practice and attainment. It would be nice and supportive for us to already have accounts from perfectly enlightened Western buddhas - people who look, speak and are like us - but as that is not the case we just have to do it ourselves. It's been done before in history many many times so in one sense we are not actually doing something entirely new, it's just new in our present time.

One thing is for sure: Buddhas are not gods, angels, high beings or saints. Buddhas are fully liberated of all form and types of selfing, in other words, they have the insight of emptiness of all phenomena. All texts say this but to me at least it is not so obvious to understand this because at the same time buddhism comes with a lot of cultural baggage and mushroom effect from previous generations of the East that is not helping us Westerners to understand what exactly it is that changes or is transformed with practice, and what isn't.

Our personalities will not change due to attaining perfect enlightenent or mahasiddhahood. We still remain, in my case for example, a heavy metal and electronic dance music loving goof, who plays the blues on guitar. I never was a shiny happy person, smiling that etheric smile of a buddha, so I doubt I will become one when I achieve mahasiddhahood. Actually, that sounds creepy to me and in fact, it looks like the exact opposite.

When the recent layers of self/bhumis have cleaned up for me, I find that I swear as much as I used to prior to dharma practice, when I was around 20 years of age. That's when I think I had the best sense of humour as well, and it's all coming back... I started changing myself, put a lid on my personality when meeting the dharma, like everyone does. So yeah, in my understanding, already quite close to the full attainment, it looks like I am just becoming me, completely and entirely again, except that most of the self-made bs is gone... I certainly have no problem of remaining a fan of 80's heavy metal or whatever cultural traits I have. In fact, that sounds awesome to me. I can be me, without the slightest imposition of a ”spiritual person”, a teacher, bodhisattva, buddha or whatever. Just me! Yay! And you, and we all.

Q: I love this stuff... I have come to this conclusion, too, that it's just about being myself fully. As it can't be any other way. I hate all the hypocrisy and built up "me's".

Kim: You know all these masters have said it that you, me and everything is already liberated and perfect. That we don't need to alter anything is what they mean. And actually changing oneself or imposing a new whatever spiritual-practitioner-bodhisattva-persona on oneself is not only entirely needless but also makes it worse in terms of increasing self-based confusion. But that's how the samsaric mind works and we all can't help reifying it. Also, it doesn't help that a lot of schools and lineages start by having the beginners become followers by carrying external marks and assuming certain ideas, even though they'd have very little or no authentic experience, i.e. insight into nature of mind. This is where our style of practice is different because the first thing we do is to get awakened and then keep going until all 13 bhumis are open and rigpa is stabilised. It is a very different kind of paradigm that the whole world is used to. I personally feel that to do it in any other way is a disservice but that's what people in most walks of life do. Cults of different shapes and forms are everywhere around us, some good, some bad, some harmless, most samsaric.

The Meaning of Prayer Wheels

The Meaning of Prayer Wheels

For context, read Lama Zopa Rinpoche's About Prayer Wheels:

https://openheartopenheart.blogspot.com/2019/05/about-prayer-wheels-by-lama-zopa.html

Dear readers,

Prayer wheels are something that I have grown attraction for during the past couple of years. By seeing many yogi-lamas, such as Sherab Zangmo and Garchen Rinpoche, whose teachings I have often followed, spin a prayer wheel, made me consider that there must something important to it. I have intuitively felt that the practice of prayer wheel, turning it with the heartmind of enlightenment (skt. bodhicitta) towards all sentient beings while chanting mantras, would be highly beneficial and effective. I am sure that in the minds of many, prayer wheels are seen as something belonging to Tibetan culture and Tibetan form of vajrayana buddhism. However,

”Texts suggest that the prayer wheel lineage remained with the nagas for millions of years until the time of Nagarjuna, a famous Indian Buddhist scholar, philosopher, and yogi. Nagarjuna is associated with the rise of Mahayana Buddhism during the first century B.C.E. and is known as the founder of the Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy...”*

*The Wheel of Great Compassion, Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Discussing nagas and time spans of ”millions of years” might be too much for many but I'd like to point out that Nagarjuna is the first master associated with prayer wheels, and he was Indian, not Tibetan. Actually, very few teachings, methods and practices originated in Tibet. In the case of prayer wheels, it appears to have originated from India in our human realm and later extensively exercised within the closed borders of Tibet until Cultural Revolution. Anyway, the idea of prayer wheel is more ancient than the nation of Tibet and it is in such practices that go beyond the recent history and particular cultures, where the timeless principles behind practices are found.

Sherab Zangmo, legendary Tibetan yogini, spinning prayer wheel.

Prayer wheels are tantric devices, embodiments of tantric technology, since they are filled with mantras, that are then consecrated or empowered by a tantric professional, that is, a lineage holder of a tantric lineage. Just like land areas, buildings, vehicles and all kinds of objects can be consecrated by vajrayana lamas, prayer wheels also are charged. Like in all vajrayana practice, it is consecration that makes the prayer wheel an exceptionally potent device through which one's personal mantra practice is multiplied in its power and effect. In other words, a consecrated prayer wheel is an amplifier of one's practice efforts that consequentially reaps greater benefits. This, of course, is something that any practitioner who understands the depth and difficulty of samsara, is interested about.

I began to look for my own prayer wheel 2-3 years ago but never wanted to acquire ones that were heavy, noisy or of poor quality. It is not easy to find a high quality prayer wheel but then I was fortunate to stumble upon Tibet Tech, which is an American company lead by long time Tibetan vajrayana practitioners of the Sakya lineage. They had innovated the traditional prayer wheel by using a lathe for the steel parts and replacing mantras printed on paper or microfilm with DVD-discs filled with mantras. DVD's allowed them to include many times more mantras inside the wheel than what printing allows. Usually prayer wheels contain 100 000 to a million mantras. Tibet Tech's hand held prayer wheel contains 8 DVD's with 8 different mantras, that add up to over 84 billion.

I acquired the basic hand held model from Tibet Tech and then asked one of my students to make me 8 DVD's with the mantras we use in Open Heart, so that I could use prayers that I practice, instead of using those of the Sakya lineage, consecrated by a Sakya lama.

My prayer wheel contains altogether 52.4 billion mantras:

• Basic Prayers (both versions of Refuge, Bodhicitta and Dedication of Merit),
• Namo Guru Rinpoche,
• Namo Yeshe Tsogyal Ye,
• A BA HU Mani Mantras,
• A BA HU Tara Mantras,
• Song of the Vajra Prayers (in both English and Dakini language), and
• A BA HU Vajra Guru Mantras.

Once I finished the decoration of my prayer wheel with Mark Rothko's (one of my favourite painters) art, it was consecrated by Guru Rinpoche. This made it finished and ready for action.

Kim's Prayer Wheel.

Since about a month that I have had it and practiced it almost daily, I have been amazed by the power it has, and at this stage of my yogic career, I am not easily amazed. I have also asked few of my senior students to try it and all of them felt the same thing. It is truly a remarkable device of liberation.

Open Heart, our way of dharma practice, has been founded to provide Western lay people with a vajrayana path that is devoid of foreign cultural traits and language. Because we are discussing a vajrayana method, which is abound with concepts strange to the modern secular mind, it is not an easy task. Now, on top of gurus, deities, mantras and whatnot things that seem odd and excessively mystical to any, I am delighted to add prayer wheels on this list of strange things, solely because they are of immense spiritual value.

May all beings be free,

Kim Katami, 23.5.2019

Open Heart Sangha,

www.en.openheart.fi