Lama Yeshe teaching at Institut Vajra Yogini, Marzens, France, 1982. Photo taken by T.Y. (Thubten Yeshe), courtesy of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

The Essence of Tibetan Buddhism is a book from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive consisting of two teachings from Lama Yeshe. The first, The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, was given in France in 1982. The second teaching, Introduction to Tantra, was given at Grizzly Lodge, California, in 1980. Edited by Nicholas Ribush.

During His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s 1982 teachings at Institut Vajra Yogini, France, Lama Yeshe was asked to “baby-sit” the audience for a couple of days when His Holiness manifested illness. The result is this excellent two-part introduction to the path to enlightenment, in which Lama explains renunciation, bodhicitta and the right view of emptiness. Please read an excerpt from Part 2 of The Three Principal Aspects of the Path by Lama Yeshe and watch a precious video of Lama giving this teaching at the end of the excerpt. 

Good afternoon. Again, unfortunately, I have to come here and talk nonsense to you. However, I heard that His Holiness is feeling much better this afternoon.

This morning I spoke very generally on the subjects of renunciation and bodhicitta. Now, this time, I will talk about the wisdom of shunyata.

From the Buddhist point of view, having renunciation of samsara and loving kindness bodhicitta alone is not enough to cut the root of the ego or the root of the dualistic mind. By meditating on and practicing loving kindness bodhicitta, you can eliminate gross attachment and feelings of craving, but the root of craving desire and attachment are ego and the dualistic mind. Therefore, without understanding shunyata, or non-duality, it is not possible to cut the root of human problems.

It’s like this example: if you have some boiling water and put cold water or ice into it, the boiling water calms down, but you haven’t totally extinguished the water’s potential to boil.

For example, all of us have a certain degree of loving kindness in our relationships, but many times our loving kindness is a mixture—half white, half black. This is very important. Many times we start with a white, loving kindness motivation but then slowly, slowly it gets mixed up with “black magic” love. Our love starts with pure motivation but as time passes, negative minds arise and our love becomes mixed with black love, dark love. It begins at first as white love but then transforms into black magic love.

I want you to understand that this is due to a lack of wisdom—your not having the penetrative wisdom to go beyond your relative projection. You can see that that’s why even religious motivations and religious actions become a mundane trip when you lack penetrative wisdom. That’s why Buddhism does not have a good feeling towards fanatical, or emotional, love. Many Westerners project, “Buddhism has no love.” Actually, love has nothing to do with emotional expression. The emotional expression of love is so gross; so gross—not refined. Buddhism has tremendous concern for, or understanding of, the needs of both the object and the subject, and in this way, loving kindness becomes an antidote to the selfish attitude.

Western religions also place tremendous emphasis on love and compassion but they do not emphasize wisdom. Understanding wisdom is the path to liberation, so you have to gain it.

Now, as far as emotion is concerned, I think for the Western world, emotion is a big thing, for some reason. However, when we react to or relate with the sense world, we should somehow learn to go the middle way.

When I was in Spain with His Holiness, we visited a monastery and met a Christian monk who had vowed to stay in an isolated place. His Holiness asked him a question, something like, “How do you feel when you experience signs of happy or unhappy things coming to you?” The monk said something like, “Happy is not necessarily happy; bad is not necessarily bad; good is not necessarily good.” I was astonished; I was very happy. “In the world, bad is not too bad; good is not too good.” To my small understanding, that was wisdom. We should all learn from that.

Ask yourself whether or not you can do this. Can you experience things the way this monk did or not? For me, this monk’s experience was great. I don’t care whether he’s enlightened or not. All I care is that he had this fantastic experience. It was helpful for his life; I’m sure he was blissful. Anyway, all worldly pleasures and bad experiences are so transitory—knowing their transitory nature, their relative nature, their conventional nature, makes you free.

The person who has some understanding of shunyata will have exactly the same experiences as that priest had. The person sees that bad and good are relative; they exist for only the conditioned mind and are not absolute qualities. The characteristic of ego is to project such fantasy notions onto yourself and others—this is the main root of problems. You then react emotionally and hold as concrete your pleasure and your pain.

You can observe right now how your ego mind interprets yourself, how your self-image is simply a projection of your ego. You can check right now. It’s worth checking. The way you check has nothing to do with the sensory mind, your sense consciousness. Close your eyes and check right now. It’s a simple question—you don’t need to query the past or the future—just ask yourself right now, “How does my mind imagine myself?”

You don’t need to search for the absolute. It’s enough to just ask about your conventional self.

Understanding your conventional mind and the way it projects your own self-image is the key to realizing shunyata. In this way you break down the gross concepts of ego and eradicate the self-pitying image of yourself.

By eliminating the self-pitying imagination of ego, you go beyond fear. All fear and other self-pitying emotions come from holding a self-pitying image of yourself.

You can also see how you feel that yesterday’s self-pitying image of yourself still exists today. It’s wrong.

Thinking, “I’m a very bad person today because I was angry yesterday, I was angry last year,” is also wrong, because you are still holding today an angry, self-pitying image from the past. You are not angry today. If that logic were correct, then Shakyamuni Buddha would also be bad, because when he was on earth, he had a hundred wives but was still dissatisfied!

Our ego holds a permanent concept of our ordinary self all the time—this year, last year, the year before: “I’m a bad person; me, me, me, me, me, me.” From the Buddhist point of view, that’s wrong. If you hold that kind of concept throughout your lifetime—you become a bad person because you interpret yourself as a bad person.

Therefore, your ego’s interpretation is unreasonable. It has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. And because your ego holds onto such a self-existent I, attachment begins.

Please continue to the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive to read Part 2 of The Three Principal Aspects of the Path in its entirety. 

We are so pleased to share a video of Lama Yeshe offering this teaching:

This talk is included in Lama Yeshe’s book The Essence of Tibetan Buddhism. You can also view the talks on the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive YouTube channel, listen to the audio book, or read the book online. 

You can find additional teachings, discourses, and advice from Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive website. 

Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), is a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.