Have
All Beings Been Our Mothers?
When
a practitioner, who personally knows and practices on behalf of ill,
dying or dead person, it has the power to move mountains of karma and
health issues. Things can really change through personal connection.
Can you think of a bigger favour to someone you know?
In
Tibet it is customary to think that all sentient beings have at some
point been our mothers. Lately I've been thinking about my human
ancestors from both of mine parental lineages and last week did some
calculations.
I,
like everyone else, have two parents. My parents both have two
parents, so including their parents, I have 4 grandparents. My 4
grandparents have altogether 8 parents of their own, which means that
consequentially, I am genetically and karmically connected to these
8 ancestors. If I go further back in history up to 10 generations, it
adds up to 1024 ancestors. I am genetically and karmically an heir to
all these 1024 people, most of who I have no idea who they have been,
what they did or where they lived. According to the definition of
familial generation, which according to Wikipedia is 25-30
years, people 10 generations before me lived about 250-300 years ago.
In 20 generations, the number of ancestors increases up o over a
million, 1 048 576 to be exact. They lived roughly about
500-600 years back, in 1400-1500's. With 30 generations, the number
of ancestors goes over a billion, to 1 073 741 824 and they
lived roughly 800 years ago. That's a staggering number. In less than
thousand years, which is a really short time in greater time frame,
we've had over 1 billion ancestors, whose genes we have and to whose
karma we are connected to. In three more generations (33), the number
goes up to 8 billion which is the number of current popuation on
Earth. The further back we go in time, the bigger the number of
ancestors gets. Already one million ancestors is difficult if not
impossible to comprehend.
 |
| By Yayoi Kusama |
To
me the idea that my body and to some extent also my mind is directly
related to countless people that I never met and do not know anything
about, is a bewildering idea. My body, its constitution and health,
is a cause of endless amount of ancestors, even beyond the scope of
homo sapiens sapiens, which is our current species. It goes
directly, without a gap, all the way back to apes and more primitive
animals. Our ancestors are numberless, just like all sentient beings
are numberless, as often recited in bodhisattva prayers.
All
of our ancestors, beyond one, two or three generations, are of course
long gone. They have left the bodies they used to pass on our genes
and according to the buddhist theory of transmigration, as samsaric
beings went on to take rebirth in all possible forms according to
their karma. Maybe some of them were practitioners and attained
something meaningful. Maybe one or two of them even attained
buddhahood but by looking at the condition of the present spiritual
state of human kind, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of
them did not attain liberation. Anyhow, through this simple logic we
can realise our connection to numberless beings and in this light,
the Tibetan idea that all beings have been our mothers at some point,
no longer sounds so abstract or silly anymore. I have been your
mother, you have been my mother, your neighbour has been your mother,
as well as mine, and so on. Our connection to everyone else does not
come only through being citizens of Planet Earth at present time but
through all these ancestors and the continuous engine of
transmigration. It is a massive system... It is both funny and
tragical to think that most of us from beginningless time, have had
and keep having the same problems. We just keep going round and
round, some as bodhisattvas and buddhas, some as samsaric beings.
Prayers
said by practitioners who have personal connection to someone or a
group of people, weigh more in the scale than prayers said by
strangers. It is so because of stronger karmic, energetic or
emotional connection between the two parties. What if we started
praying and practicing on behalf of all those ancestors to whom we
are actually connected to through our bloodline? Each of us has the
capability to tune in and feel the presence of all those people and
pray for them, for example, chanting Guru Rinpoche's name or the
Refuge for them. In my experience this is an immensely touching and
fulfilling practice of wisdom and compassion that really changes
destinies by removing immense mountains of karma.
-Kim
Katami, 19.8.2019
Open
Heart Sangha,
