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Lama Zopa Rinpoche at Maitreya Instituut, Loenen, Netherlands, July 2015. Photo by Jan-Paul Kool.
“If the self-cherishing thought, the ego, is strong, then the attachment clinging to this life also becomes very strong. The stronger the attachment is, the easier anger arises,” Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaches in Cutting the Root of Samsara, the third volume in the four-volume ebook series of Rinpoche’s teachings from the 1991 Kopan Course and featured in the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive’s June E-letter.
“The happiness of the I becomes so important. In the view of the self-cherishing thought, the I becomes so important, so precious, therefore, my happiness becomes very important. My happiness and this life’s happiness become very important.
“Anybody who does a small thing disturbs us so much. Even birds making a noise when we want to meditate or when we want quiet to have a sleep – even a dog or a bird making a noise outside, or somebody talking – even a small thing becomes a big disturbance. Even if the decoration of the house is slightly wrong in our view, how things are put on the table, how things are decorated – even just a little bit in the wrong way according to our point of view, it’s the wrong way – this becomes very important. There are things in the house put in a slightly different place than where we’d like them. The other person puts them in this place where we don’t want them to be, moving them from there, putting them here, here. It’s supposed to be there, but she moved it here. It’s supposed to be that way because we put it that way. Whatever it is.
“Even a tiny mouse just going on the roof, making a little noise, just some noise, something we’re just able to hear, even a rat just quickly passing through the room. While we’re not expecting rats to run, it comes through. If we expected it, there’d be no problem. If we expected it, if we opened our mind toward rats, there’d be no problem. But if our mind is closed toward the rat, when we’re not expecting it, when we’re not wishing it, then the rat just quickly runs through, close to us, it becomes incredibly terrifying. Terrifying. Incredibly shocking. A big shock. There’s a rat in the house! A big shock! Immediately we want to move into another room or into another hotel where there’s no rat.
“The stronger the self-cherishing thought is, the stronger the attachment to this life, so the worldly concern is there. In the view of that mind, the I becomes so important, my happiness becomes so important. This life’s happiness becomes so important, so when there’s a small disturbance, which is such nonsense to be worried about, it becomes a big upset. …”
Read the entire excerpt from Cutting the Root of Samsara in the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive June E-letter: https://www.lamayeshe.com/index.php?sect=article&id=1061
You can watch the live webcast of Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaching at Maitreya Instituut and find schedule updates on FPMT’s Livestream page: http://livestream.com/FPMT/NL2015
Lama Zopa Rinpoche is the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.