Following Gen Devi’s morning meditation on cherishing love, Gen-la Khyenrab gave inspiring commentary to the section on ‘Living beings have no faults’ in which we are encouraged to relate to the gold nugget of our own and others’ limitless potential, our Buddha Nature, and not to the dirt of our delusions. He said we should meditate forever on this sentence both with respect to ourself and others: ‘In the heart of even the cruellest and most degenerate person lies the potential for limitless love, compassion and wisdom.’
In the afternoon, he followed up on this with a powerful teaching on the faults of self-cherishing, so that we develop a strong wish to ‘stop our mind from following this delusion’ so that we can eventually abandon it. He explained how there is no contradiction between focusing on the faults of self-cherishing and seeing living beings as ‘faultless’, because the problem is self-cherishing, not living beings.
Gen-la read extensively from the book How to Transform Your Life highlighting just how profound, clear and extensive Geshe-la’s teachings are and encouraging us not to think, ‘we know this’, but to return to the text again and again until we realise the meaning fully.
With so many people gathered together, the Festival gives many opportunities not just to cherish others but also to recognize our own self-cherishing. Standing in queues for lunch, sometimes not getting to sit where you want in the Temple, doing your volunteer work … of course, sometimes delusions may manifest. But that’s why we are here. To learn how to recognize the delusions when they arise, to examine their faults and to learn skilfully how to let them go. Here at the Festival, we are in an environment where everyone is training together and therefore the encouragement to apply Dharma to your own mind ‘practically’, as Geshe-la says, is strong. And when we do it, we discover that Dharma works. And our mind changes and the delusions diminish.
And enlightenment is possible.