KKSG WICHITA
News and Notes:
Summer 2005
Lama Kathy Wesley visited
Wichita August 1-4, 2005. She taught on the Heart
Sutra following a text by Bokar Rinpoche. Emptiness is a basic
teaching of Buddhism, but one that is easily misunderstood. In
general, emptiness is an antidote to the naive belief that most people
have that things in our world exist in the way we see them: permanent,
solid, and independent. In order to understand emptiness, we need
to investigate. Investigation will show us that our world is
actually impermanent, compounded, and interdependent. When you
understand this, you understand emptiness. Obviously, the
intellectual understanding of the this is not enough to uproot the
deeply habitual ways we perceive the world. However, when
intellectual investigation is combined with deep experience in
meditation, the way we see the world can change profoundly. We
can lighten up and relax, our suffering diminishes, and we find a
stable state of happiness that is independent of conditions. As
the Buddha said:
"All composed things are like a
dream,
a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of
lightning.
That is how to meditate on them,
that is how to observe them."
-- the Diamond Sutra
Vajra Vidya
Summer Retreat.
Several of our members went to the annual 10-day Vajra Vidya
retreat in Crestone, CO. This retreat was on Tsele Rangdrol's Lamp of Mahamudra, taught
by Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, the abbot of KTD. Mahamudra is the
direct realization of the nature of mind, the essence of the path to
enlightenment in the Kagyu lineage. Rinpoche particularly
stressed the importance of purification, accumulation, and receiving
the blessings of the lineage as the necessary preparations for
realizing mahamudra. For this reason, the ngondro or preliminary
practices are essential in our lineage -- as Rinpoche said, they are
not only the necessary preliminaries for the practice of mahamudra, but are the
necessary preliminaries for the realization
of mahamudra. Rinpoche therefore stressed the need to exert
ourselves in practice. The retreat was
quite inspiring, so be sure to ask Karen, Jane or Greg about the
experience.