Fall Festival 2016

“At the Festival we feel ourselves changing. And it’s that sense of possibility we want to bring home with us to share with everyone else.”

On the final day of Fall Festival, downtown Toronto is teeming with Kadampas making their way to the Metro Convention Centre with their luggage.

It’s always a welcoming sight at a Fall Festival when Kadampas are spotted everywhere. We descend on an international city and make a mark, particularly our ordained Sangha. One taxi driver asked a Festival goer what the main points were from the Conference and a delighted Kadampa tried to give the essence of the teachings and explained the ultimate goal is a blissfully peaceful mind.

Gen-la Khyenrab continued to give commentary to the New Essence of Vajrayana and emphasized how this practice can cut our attachment but the power of the practice depends upon us holding the profound knowledge of emptiness.

To conclude, Gen-la gave some beautiful advice. He said at Festivals we get so many blessings and we are with our Sangha, our spiritual community. “We make pure minds together. At home when we’re on our own, remember that all those people are with us. They are with us and our Spiritual Guide.”

Gen-la Khyenrab said his teaching on the 11 Yogas, which he concluded this morning, was not a detailed commentary, but more like a blessing transmission. We should see it as an encouragement to study Venerable Geshe-la’s commentaries ourselves so that we understand the practices precisely. Put time into studying, he encouraged us. It’s worth it and will give rise to a huge reward, more than anything in samsara. He advised us to keep New Guide to Dakini Land by our bed and to read a little bit each day.

He also encouraged us to practice. ‘Once you’ve tasted the experience of Vajrayogini you’ll never turn back. But to gain this experience we need to put quality time into our practice. We need quality time with the Guru, not just with the kids!’

In the afternoon he began his brief commentary on the body mandala of Buddha Heruka, based on the practice New Essence of Vajrayana. The day concluded with a beautiful Wishfulfilling Jewel with tsog.

Afterwards there is a sense of the Festival winding down. There is still another meditation and teaching tomorrow but people are beginning to make their goodbyes. But everywhere I go I hear the same refrain: Hasn’t it been an amazing festival? Hasn’t it been wonderful?

Another beautiful, clear day here in Toronto. “It’s not always like this,” I’m reliably told by a Canadian, but for us out-of towner festival goers our Toronto seems like a beautiful appearance that is quite easy to integrate with Keajra, Vajrayogini’s pure land. And as we learn today it this integration and transformation that is the very essence of Highest Yoga Tantra.

It is the first day of the commentary, and Gen-la Khyenrab explains the 11 Yogas, or main practices, of Vajrayogini. He says in Highest Yoga Tantra we “harness what we do in samsara in such a way as to take us out of samsara”. Case in point, enjoying things. Gen-la explains how normally when we enjoy things, the pleasure give rise to attachment which in turn creates suffering. But with the yoga of experiencing nectar we learn to ‘hijack the process of pleasure by recalling emptiness.’ In this way our pleasure is conjoined with wisdom and becomes a path to attaining the clear light of bliss. We ‘are not transforming attachment, but preventing it. It’s contraception for attachment!’

With great skill, Gen-la takes us through the essential points of the practice. Even though the practice is extensive, Gen-la leaves us feeling encouraged and wanting to practice. As he says, ‘in the Guru’s pure land, he sees us all as enlightened beings, so why would we have a problem practicing’. If we connect our mind with our Spiritual Guide’s mind, we receive blessings and then anything is possible, even our own enlightenment.

That sense of possibility and meaningful enjoyment pervades the whole festival environment. Everywhere you go in between the sessions you see Sangha friends enjoying themselves in our ‘pure land’ version of Toronto. We are enjoying the water front, the cafes and restaurants, maybe even a ride up the Space Needle, but really what we enjoying are the blessings of listening to and talking about and practicing Dharma, connecting to the Buddhas, and relying upon Sangha. At the Festival we feel ourselves changing. And it’s that sense of possibility we want to bring home with us to share with everyone else.

Crisp air, cloudless blue skies and a stunning autumn clarity greet us this morning. The outer clarity is a reminder of the inner clarity that is the very nature of Vajrayogini. As Gen-la Khyenrab explains in today’s beautiful Vajrayogini empowerment, Vajrayogini is the manifestation of the wisdom of the clear light of bliss.

Clarity and concision again characterize Gen-la Khyenrab’s presentation. He first encourages everyone by explaining the benefits of Vajrayogini practice. The first benefit is that we will receive great and powerful blessings. The ensuing empowerment bears witness to just that.

The meditations and visualizations within the Vajrayogini empowerment are sublime and profound. Gen-la takes us through them step by step so that even beginners feel engaged and clearly guided. It seems with every passing year our Kadampa Buddhism becomes more modern, essential, and easy to integrate.

In the afternoon Gen-la Jampa gives the traditional post-empowerment question and answer session. His lighthearted and practical answers inspires confidence that we can integrate this practice into our daily lives. Don’t try to push all this knowledge into your mind, he says. Relax, feel fortunate, and give yourselves time to learn gradually.

During the breaks we are assisted in feeling fortunate by strangers calling out ‘happy thanksgiving’ wherever we go. Turns out it’s Thanksgiving Day in Canada. It’s also Dakini Day, so we do Offering to the Spiritual Guide dedicated to the long life of Venerable Geshe-la. Meditating and chanting within an awesome assembly of practitioners, old and new, we celebrate his kindness in bestowing upon us and our world the unbelievable gifts we have been receiving. Happy Thanksgiving!

Today was a wondrous day. Today we received the highest yoga tantra empowerment of Buddha Heruka, an experience, as Genla Khyenrab pointed out, of great good fortune. And don’t we know it … as the meditation hall gradually filled, the air was full of anticipation.

Gen-la Khyenrab conducted the empowerment with exceptional clarity and concision. The Heruka empowerment consists of a series of empowerments through which which we receive the blessings for our future attainments of Heruka’s body, speech and mind. Gen-la kept his explanations brief, focusing instead on the individual empowerments, allowing each one to flow into the next seamlessly. This allowed us to remain undistracted, absorbed in meditation, throughout the empowerment.

Even those experiencing the empowerment for the first time commented on the clarity. One person said to me, ‘it wasn’t as complex as I’d been led to believe’. Among all the newly empowered that I spoke to there was so much joy and gratitude.

Having just received the empowerment of the blue deity Heruka, we spilled out on to the Toronto streets only to be met by thousands of blue clad people streaming by us. Were we still in Heruka’s mandala? Or were these people Toronto Blue Jay fans on their way to the game? Of course, as we’d just been training in, that depends on our mind. With a pure mind we will experience a pure world. The empowerment is such a powerful event, directly showing us the pure land as an actual possibility. Great good fortune indeed. And there’s more to come ….

With great clarity, Gen-la Jampa guides two meditations in the morning, helping us to set the best of intentions for the Heruka empowerment. In the first, the focus is on renunciation, the wish for permanent liberation from the sufferings of samsara. Gen-la Jampa emphasizes that renunciation is a joyful mind. He says it is a mind of great wisdom, so happy in the knowledge that there is a solution. In the second meditation we cultivate bodhichitta, the wish to attain enlightenment. In particular, we juxtapose our current powerlessness when it comes to truly helping others with the ability to help that we would have if we were enlightened.

During the lunch break, downtown Toronto is teeming with smiling Kadampas. Considering that we are walking along a busy street in a major metropolis the experience is extraordinary. I feel like I am on the friendliest street in the world, where everyone you see is responding with smiles, waves, hugs. Kadampa Festivals have the power to transform their environments into resembling pure lands. But it’s one thing to see that happen within an enclosed space like Manjushri KMC, it’s another thing entirely to see several city blocks transformed in this way. It’s clear why we need Kadampa Festivals in our world creating visions of peace.

In the afternoon, Gen-la Khyenrab guides us through the first stages of the Heruka empowerment, mainly preparing us for the actual empowerments that come tomorrow. He takes us through the first part of the ceremony, whereby everyone in the assembly is symbolically reborn as vajra brothers and sisters, part of the same spiritual family. We are taught that the real protection is love. It is this shared experience of love that is transforming an impersonal convention center and impersonal downtown streets into areas of great warmth and interconnection, into a mandala, in which we sense the extraordinary potential of our human lives, the possibility of enlightenment for everyone.

Tonight we look for signs in our dreams, and tomorrow we enter Heruka’s pure land.

Just below Toronto’s Space Needle, the iconic CN Tower, Kadampas from all over the world, close to 2500 of us, streamed into the Convention Centre for the beginning of the International Fall Festival 2016. The large conference room had been transformed into a beautiful meditation hall, and the room was packed for Gen-la Khyenrab’s introductory talk. Four massive video screens hung from the ceilings so that everyone felt very connected to Gen-la during his gently incisive and compelling teaching.

Gen-la welcomed us all with a message from Venerable Geshe-la encouraging us to maintain a happy mind through out the Festival by listening, contemplating and meditating on the teachings. Gen-la said, I suggest we all do this as a sublime offering to our Spiritual Guide. The key is to forget our problems and focus on Dharma. However due to our uncontrolled desire for the fulfillment of our wishes we forget to do this! Gen-la suggested the antidote to this laziness of attachment: meditate on death, so that we seek pure happiness through Dharma. We still enjoy things, he said, but with wisdom so that our enjoyment is integrated with Dharma.

Gen-la then gave a brief introduction to the three principal minds taught in sutra: renunciation, bodhichitta, and emptiness. With his no-fuss manner and his clear and confident (and funny!) presentation, Gen-la makes the truth of the Dharma seem so self-evident. As he said, when we recognize the truth of suffering, that all samsara is suffering, we simply lose interest in samsara. It’s not a struggle to do so. It’s just wisdom.

During the bodhichitta section, Gen-la quoted from the New Eight Step to Happiness, that ‘the more we think about emanations (of Buddhas), the more we begin to think that everyone is an emanation.’

Sitting near the back in that long conference room, I looked at Gen-la emanating on the screens in front of me. Physically far away, but due to the kindness of modern technology, right there in front of me! Similarly if we regard everyone as an emanation of the Buddhas, that special view will bring the Buddhas close to us, right into our hearts. Surrounded by several thousand sincere practitioners, now is the time to train in this pure view. And tomorrow the empowerment begins for real.