[From a public by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche given at Tampa PSG in January 2011. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso. Transcribed by Nancy Hamlin-Vogler and Patricia Ahearn. Edited by Basia Coulter. All right reserved. Please do not reprint without permission.]

The Buddha taught the Dharma as a path. Although all of us, sentient beings inhabiting the six realms of samsara, have buddha nature and therefore posses within us the perfect cause of awakening that contains the qualities of all buddhas, we have been deluded by the mistaken thought of I. And so, although we are inherently able to achieve the dharmakaya for our own benefit and the rupakaya for the benefits of others, we continue to wander in samsara for no other reason than the delusion produced by this thought of I. It was in order that we be able to overcome this delusion that the Buddha taught the dharma as a path. Essential to this path is coming to trust ourselves and believe in our own ability.

Many years have passed since His Holiness the 16th Gyalwang Karmapa brought the Dharma to this land and throughout those many years we have all worked hard and have come to know one another well. As he is my root guru, I consider his vision as a command and therefore I have done my best to assist in your accomplishment of the dharmakaya for your own benefit and the rupakaya for the benefit of others. I regard doing this as my responsibility, however for the result to occur, the first thing that is needed is for you to trust yourself enough to overcome despair.

The Buddha said that the Tathagata does not dispel the sufferings of beings by wiping them away with his hand nor can he pass his realization to them. Beings’ sufferings are dispelled by his presentation of the peace of dharmata. To understand the meaning of these words, we need to remember that all buddhas achieve buddhahood motivated by the wish to benefit others. No one ever has or ever will achieve buddhahood with the selfish motivation of wishing to achieve buddhahood for their own benefit. But in spite of the fact that all buddhas become buddhas out of the wish to benefit others, they nevertheless cannot simply wipe away our pain nor can they hand us their awakening.

It is not that they are too weak to wipe away our pain or that they will not hand us their realization because they are too greedy or selfish. They would do these things if they could. The reason why this is impossible is that realization is an interdependent phenomenon and it involves the recognition by a person of the nature of their own mind in connection with the instruction they receive from a buddha or his or her representative.

What does it mean to say that buddhas dispel beings suffering by presenting the peace of dhamata? Dharmata is the way things really are and it is peace because it is utterly unchanging. Absolute truth is beyond change or fluctuation. Our fundamental nature never changes and it is in order to recognize that that we practice. But in spite of this, when we practice, we often adulterate our practice with our kleshas. We may practice in a state of pride, anger, or attachment. Practicing in that way, we may gain the ability to be reborn as a deva, asura, or human repeatedly without being reborn in lower states, but we will not achieve the nirvana of two-fold transcendence. A perfect practitioner needs to seek out and implement the means of achieving nirvana that transcends the extreme of samsara through recognition [of mind’s nature] and that transcends nirvana itself through compassion. The most important thing for us to achieve is “the single medicine for one hundred ills”—bodhichitta. Most dharma is concerned with bodhichitta; with how to generate it, how to strengthen it, why to do so, and so forth. Unfortunately, we often practice it with partiality—we feel love and compassion for some and not for others. As long as we restrict our compassion to some and prevent it from being all-encompassing, we will only be able to prevent lower rebirth; we will not achieve the nirvana of two-fold transcendence. It is therefore especially important that we cultivate impartiality.

What we need is love, compassion, and bodhichitta that are impartial, unlimited, and endless. Most of us have some love and compassion, and we have some love and compassion for some beings, but not for others. We have love and compassion sometimes and not at other times. Most of us are fairly loving and compassionate as long as things are going our way. Whenever things stop going our way, our love and compassion seem to disappear. We have compassion for those with whom we identify and as long as our compassion is based upon that, we will not have compassion for those with whom we do not identify—those from a different country, of a different religious tradition, of a different race, or different species. Our compassion may be reactive—when others are nice to us, it is easy for us to be nice to them; when others are mean to us, we are mean to them.

Since we all suffer, regardless of how we treat one another, we must at some point accept a responsibility to help everyone regardless of our relationship to them. Once we really want to help everyone equally, then true and impartial love and compassion will naturally arise within us. When we cultivate love and compassion as the relative aspect of our path, our path becomes very quick and the emergence of ripening of the qualities within us is speeded up greatly. When we cultivate relative bodhichitta, we come to realize absolute bodhichitta, and that realization gives us the power to help all beings until samsara is emptied. That is why bodhichitta is called “the single medicine for one hundred ills” and why it is so essential for the genuine practitioner.

Someone who has genuine love and compassion will never restrict their compassion to those who practice the same religion that they do. They will definitely feel as much compassion for followers of no religion and for followers of other religious traditions, and they will work to benefit those others in a way that fits with the others’ belief system. For example, the Buddha once blessed Mara so that Mara entered the state in which he taught several profound sutras. Those sutras taught by Mara were so profound that many beings came to recognize the nature of their mind through hearing and studying them. This did not arise because of any inherent ability or desire within Mara. It was through the blessing and power of the Buddha. By working through Mara in that way, the Buddha was able to help many others in accordance with their own belief system. In more recent terms, when His Holiness the 16th Gyalwang Karmapa went to Calgary in Western Canada, he was approached by a young member of the First Nation (in this country you would say a Native American), who said to His Holiness, “I like you and I find you inspiring. I am Indian and you are Tibetan. I don’t know your ways and you sure don’t know my ways. If I pray to you in my way, can you bless me in your way?” And His Holiness said, “Definitely. Don’t worry.” So mere difference in religious tradition is obviously irrelevant. We cannot say that there is an inherent difference between Buddhist faith and non-Buddhist faith. Faith is simply a state of mind and is therefore empty. It is merely the play of that mind, which is empty lucidity, so it is definitely beyond sectarian differences.

A genuine practitioner needs to be able to trust him or herself. Our minds are really hidden from others; others can at best infer from our behavior what is really going on within us. Except for buddhas who directly know the minds of others, no one else really knows what is going on with us. But we are never hidden from ourselves. We know whether we are doing well or poorly. A genuine practitioner needs to be able to say, “I have meditated on love and compassion to this degree in this life. As much as I could, I have done this or that practice and so on it will be ok if I die today or tomorrow.” It may take us quite a while to get through all of the stages of the path; it might be very difficult for us to achieve the state of Vajradhara in this life, but at least we can make some progress along the way. If we consider the path to be like a staircase with one hundred steps, and we can make it up ten of those steps in one life, then in ten life-times, we will have completed the path and that is quite good. The alternative is less beneficial; we may look like great practitioners, we may rise early and go to sleep late, and we may never let go of our malas with our hands, but if we have not gotten to the point where we have confidence when we face adversity, if we quiver in terror at death, then our practice has not been satisfactory; we have not gained confidence in ourselves. There is a saying “Dharma is revealed by adversity”; the quality of one’s practice, the degree of one’s confidence is evident when things are not going well. When things have gone poorly and someone is quivering in terror as they approach death, it is very very sad for them and for the people around them. So we, as practitioners, need to take responsibility for and take hold of our own lives and our own practice, and by doing so, we will become the best type of practitioner. I think this is what self-confidence really is.

It is very hard to look at somebody and really see what is going on inside them to really know. Machik Lapdron in Praise to Guru Padmapa Sangye says, “Father, you sleep throughout the day and night continuously. This is a sign of your unbroken natural meditation.” In most cases, if we saw somebody sleeping all day and night, realization would not be our first thought. But Machik Lapdron knew, because she was an extraordinary being. If we were looking at Padampa Sangye today, we would not know what is going on with him. We would see this reportedly rather ugly guy sleeping all the time. We would not know. In The Words of My Prefect Teacher there is a story about Jetsun Milarepa who slept in the same dwelling as a lama who was diligent in his practice. The lama would stay up very late chanting, then he would sleep a little bit in the middle of the night, and then he would got up very early and begin his recitations and chanting again. Meanwhile, Jetsun Milarepa slept peacefully. Eventually, when Milarepa woke up, the lama said to him, “You know, you look like a great yogin, but why are you so lazy? Why do you sleep so much?” But Milarepa knew that when this lama had been doing his good-looking chanting, he had actually been thinking about how much money he was going to get after selling a yak that he was going to have slaughtered. So Milarepa answered him, “Well, you know, you are right. I usually do get up earlier but last night I could not sleep. I spent the whole damn night thinking about how much money I am going to make.” So holy beings like Milarepa can actually see what is going on inside somebody’s mind but we cannot. The best we can do is to take ourselves as witnesses; the utmost kindness that we can do to ourselves is to let go, as much as we can, of negativity, to do our best to cultivate goodness at least to the point where we have no quilt about how we are living our lives. We do not need to become renunciate monastics or do anything fancy; we just need to be able to trust ourselves. That is a very important thing to understand.

We cannot judge others; we do not know what is really going on within them. But we can and do know what is going on within us. If we can be non-judgmental toward others, if we can rejoice in their virtue whatever it is, regardless of their religious tradition or affiliation, then by being free of jealousy, we will accrue the same merit as they do. This will protect us from sectarian hatred and enable us to accumulate an ocean of merit, day by day, drop by drop. By cultivating relative bodhichitta, we will eventually discover absolute bodhichitta. So we need to do our best at least to move in that direction and if we do that, then I guarantee you that we will discover genuine self-confidence.