In this Dharma Talk, Tibetan Buddhist translator and meditation instructor Michael Lobsang Tenpa discusses a practice dear to his heart—cultivation of the four immeasurables: lovingkindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Drawing on the writings of Dzogchen lineage lamas and pith instructions from contemporary Buddhist masters, Lobsang Tenpa elaborates on the effects historically associated with these meditation methods, psychological transformation, karmic causality, and the realization of the ultimate nature of our mind.

Michael Lobsang Tenpa did his BA and MA in South Asian studies, was ordained as a monastic in the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and spent a long time living in Nepal and translating for Buddhist lamas from all the major Tibetan lineages. In 2022, he returned to lay life as a translator, meditation instructor, and teacher, focusing on ecodharma, green mindfulness, and green Buddhism. His home practice community is the Contemplative Consciousness Network (CCN) in the UK.

The post The Four Immeasurables  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Where did you grow up? I was born in Siberia and spent the first eleven years of my life in the Ural mountain region. My family eventually moved to Moscow, which is where I went to high school.

When did you become a Buddhist and why? I started reading books on the Dzogchen tradition at about 14, but my primary interest then was Hinduism. After my first trip to India at 18, I was so impressed with Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon, and with His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s book Healing Anger, that I soon went to a Buddhist teaching event and took refuge. 

Is your family Buddhist? No, though their interest in matters of philosophy and natural healing has certainly affected my own hippie disposition.

What’s your favorite breakfast on retreat? Cereal with plant-based milk and black coffee.

What’s your daily practice? In the Tibetan tradition, one accumulates a number of daily commitments, which include daily recitations and some analytical meditations to do. An important part of my personal commitment package is Tara practice, combined with the four immeasurables (equanimity, love, compassion, and joy). 

Favorite aphorism? A quote from Sherwood Smith: “Kindness never makes anything worse, and it can often make things better.”

Favorite musician? Vienna Teng. In addition to her wonderful albums, she has a musical on the life of a female Buddha (check out The Fourth Messenger)!

What’s the longest you’ve gone without meditating? How do you get back on track? Because of the daily commitment system that exists in the Tibetan tradition, I haven’t skipped my practice since I was 21, even though it is done quite hastily on some days. 

Book on your nightstand? Blazing Splendor, by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, and A Posse of Princesses, by Sherwood Smith.

What do you like to do in your free time? I like long walks while listening to either music or podcasts.

Who is your teacher? I have six heart teachers: the late Lama Zopa Rinpoche, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Khandro Tseringma, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, Garchen Rinpoche, and Lama Alan Wallace. Many others have provided invaluable guidance as well.

What non-Buddhist do you look to for guidance? Jane Goodall, Karen Armstrong, Thomas Merton, and occasionally stories about Neem Karoli Baba.

Favorite subject in school? Classic literature. I was very passionate about Dickens!

What was your first job? Social media promotion for big brands. I somehow ended up teaching meditation to fellow agency workers.

Most used emoji? 🙏

What would you do if you weren’t a Buddhist teacher? Teaching yoga nidra (yogic sleep) to help people find some rest. That’s still something I do on occasion. 

What Buddhist book has most affected your practice? There are a number of books that I’ve read again and again, but Blazing Splendor: The Memoirs of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, as told to Erik Pema Kunsang and Marcia Binder Schmidt, stands out as the most important. The book is a collection of memories from one of the most prominent teachers of the 20th century—and the father to the influential lamas Mingyur Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche. By describing encounters with great yoginis and yogis, Blazing Splendor shows what advanced and sustained practice can bring, explains how to derive inspiration from the history of one’s lineage, and provides bits of advice that can enrich our practice of the nature of the mind. 

Why did you want to teach a dharma talk on the four immeasurables for Tricycle? The four immeasurables have completely transformed my life, and they are so universal that anyone can benefit from them. I also believe it’s very important to revisit the ways of teaching them that exist in the original traditions as a way to reach profound, liberating levels.

♦

This September, watch Michael Lobsang Tenpa’s Dharma Talk on the four immeasurables at tricycle.org/dharmatalks.

The post Visiting Teacher: Michael Lobsang Tenpa appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One of my early memories related to books is that of my mother reading me a book about wizardry—young wizards from Long Island, to be precise—before sleep. At one point, she stops and struggles to pronounce an extremely long, multisyllabic name of a cosmic force that temporarily arrives in our dimension to help the main characters. “I don’t know how to read this,” she admits. “Is that phrase in the book?” I ask doubtfully.

The book charms me so much that I quickly start reading it myself—I’m too impatient to wait for it to be read aloud by someone else in sessions (same reason I’m still not particularly good with audiobooks). Eventually, I reread the book—So You Want to Be a Wizard, by Diane Duane—more than a hundred times before losing my first copy (extremely well-worn by then) during a big family move from the Urals to Moscow.

Although it was years before I could find another copy of the same novel (now always traveling with me as a digital book), I continued reading other parts of the same young adult series. More importantly, the book’s key ideas deeply impacted me, brewing and normalizing the outline of my life and work—things that stemmed from my inner predispositions. 

So You Want to Be a Wizard begins with a 13-year-old girl named Nita finding a wizardry manual while trying to escape a beating from a school bully. The manual she picks up is not merely a collection of spells—rather, it’s a self-updating guide that gives one access to the cosmic database of wizardry. The price to pay for that access (and the energy of wizardry itself) is taking an oath to use magic only to protect life and ease the pain of beings: essentially, to slow down entropy and to protect all who live.

Nita does not hesitate to take the oath, and neither did I in those days—reading it out loud numerous times in the hopes of obtaining similar access to special powers beyond the ordinary. While my ability to control natural elements, travel across universes, or manipulate the laws of physics never arrived, the underlying ethic of protecting life stayed deep within me as an aspirational wish until, some years later, at the age of 18, I took the bodhisattva precepts from a visiting Tibetan lama. The wizard’s oath turned into an oath of bodhicitta, now reviewed and contemplated daily: the vow to fully uncover the amazing potential within, to fully wake up for the benefit of all beings, and, on the road toward that, to practice and perfect the six amazing qualities of a bodhisattva: generosity, ethical discipline, and so on, culminating with the wisdom that sees emptiness and interdependence in union. The bodhisattva precepts guide one in applying those qualities to daily life to protect and nurture beings, while the “cosmic bodhisattvas” (like Kuan Yin or Kshitigarbha) provide a steady inflow of inspiration, and, for some people, miracles on the path. 

Unsurprisingly, I remember Duane’s formulation of the wizard’s oath almost as well as the words used in the actual bodhisattva precepts. Just like the precepts expressed in slightly different words across the different traditions, the wizardly oath to protect the world can also be shared in different ways. In one of the later books in the series, Duane offers an alternative recension of the same oath, formulated in this alternate way for a young autistic prodigy:

Life
more than just being alive
(and worth the pain)

but hurts:
fix it
grows:
keep it growing 

wants to stop:
remind
check / don’t hurt
be sure

One’s watching: 
get it right!
later it all works out,
honest

meantime,
make it work
now
(because now
is all you ever get:
now is)

Nita’s journey as a wizard quickly puts her at odds with the one force representing the origin of all problems in the universe–the Lone Power–which represents and embodies the wish to isolate, to exclude oneself from the interdependence and interpenetration of things. Encounters with this force, which sometimes manifests in its menacing avatars and sometimes simply acts through our in-dwelling afflictions, are never fully unsympathetic: even the original troublemaker is shown to be worthy of eventually being reintegrated into the boundless web of life. 

Since this process of protecting and rebuilding is all about supporting and strengthening the interconnectedness of life, Nita is inevitably supported by numerous companions, including a fellow teenage wizard Kit (who is himself bullied for being an immigrant), family members, and numerous other wizards from across the universe—human, animal, alien, straight, cisgender, transgender, and multigender from numerous species and numerous corners of the world. That was a powerful lesson for me in finding allies—who might be nothing like you and yet full of love—anywhere and everywhere.

Like everyone striving to master an art, Nita and Kit rely on the support of senior wizards, who, although not showing up as teachers per se (since the wizardly manual provides all the relevant information), still act as guides and advisors. The art of wizardry is embodied in these experienced practitioners; what seems novel and somewhat confusing to a beginner permeates the life of an adept with effortless ease. Showing by personal example is, inescapably, a huge part of Buddhist practice. My trajectory in the dharma would certainly not be as long or joyful if, as an interpreter, I didn’t get a chance to accompany senior practitioners and observe their very way of being, so richly imbued with dharmic qualities and insights. 

Interestingly enough—for my young queer mind—the primary advisors of the young wizards turn out to be two men in their 30s, cohabitating in a Long Island house with a few dogs and other wizardly pets (including a talking parrot). Tom and Carl, as they are called, are described as handsome and broad-shouldered, and no particular explanation is given for their shared living situation—except that they work and live together and enjoy the respect of their neighbors and fellow wizards alike. 

What’s up with that, the readers later asked? Was this a revolutionary literary step for a children’s book originally published in 1986? In retrospect, I believe so. When asked about the romantic implications of Tom and Carl’s situation, Duane politely declined to elaborate, explaining that the two are based on two specific friends and citing the need to respect their privacy (and their actual familial arrangement, which might be completely different). Over time, she instead introduced a wide range of openly queer characters that joined the series’ cast or were always present in her novels aimed at adult audiences. However, for me personally, a basic level of representation was already right there from the very first book: two men can cohabitate, do wizardry together, help others, and adopt pets. As someone who’s relatively private about his personal life, I find that level of detail quite sufficient—and extremely relatable. 

Quite importantly, in Duane’s universe, Tom and Carl’s situation is simply not an issue of anyone’s concern. She creates an alternate reality, similar to the one in the sitcom Schitt’s Creek in which homophobia is not given a place. This equally pertains to the issue of being trans: gender-affirming magical transformations are described as absolutely permissible in the eyes of the Powers that preside over magic, because why not? An author of YA books who honors trans people in her work? I bow to that.

I keep revisiting Duane’s novels to this day. My other favorite in the series, A Wizard Abroad, unpacks Irish mythology and introduces the concept of a land haunted by old energetic traumas (something not unheard of in the chöd lineage of Buddhist practice), all against the backdrop of Nita developing her first crush. This book and a few others remain part of my lunch table collection, and I still find their moral lessons personally pertinent.

I’m forever grateful for how much one book can do in offering both representation and ethical guidance.

What’s more, I’m forever grateful for how much one book can do in offering both representation and ethical guidance. The wizard’s oath and its ethos did not make me a Buddhist, and Tom and Carl certainly did not make me queer. They just helped me normalize what I already knew about myself and ethics, offering a ray of hope and a glimpse into something bigger. One thoughtfully written book about kindness and interdependence was enough for that (though we need hundreds and thousands more). In much the same way, when fellow queer people ask me whether there’s anything in Buddhism to support the validity of our existence, I usually just need to quote one powerful ally—such as Garchen Rinpoche, with his simple and powerful words on queerness—to give them hope. Yes, the more representation and support, the better. But even one person performing the truest wizardry of kindness, the wizardry of living and letting live, is sometimes enough to keep us going.

The post Sometimes, You Need Only One Book appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the Indo-Tibetan textual tradition, the four seals (Skt. caturmudrā, T. phyag rgya bzhi), or dom shyi in the Tibetan oral tradition, are the four necessary characteristics of a view or teaching to mark or certify it as Buddhist. These seals mark our views as Buddhist, as opposed to taking refuge in the three jewels, which makes us Buddhist through precepts. Tibetan monastics memorize the four seals in their teenage years in a short formula:

All compounded things are impermanent.

All contaminated things are dukkha (unsatisfactory).

All phenomena are empty and selfless.

Nirvana is true peace.

Several sources attributed to the Buddha, including The Questions of the Nāga King Sāgara (Sagara­naga­raja­pariprccha), mention these four statements. They are closely related to the three marks of existence—impermanence, dukkha, and nonself—that play a quintessential role in the Pali and the Sanskrit traditions of insight meditation. Although the last of the four gives hope for an eventual end to suffering, we must initially grapple with the first three seals.

The Tibetan word for a follower of Buddhism—nangpa—means “insider” and implies that we only truly live in the fold of the Buddhist worldview when these four seals start to permeate our perception and become its natural element. The real challenge is not understanding the four seals conceptually but applying them to our existence, with all our multifaceted identities, challenges, dramas, dreams, and aspirations. We should measure the four seals against the fabric of our daily life to see with greater clarity all the individual threads and knots that make up our lives and then let them dissolve in an ocean of spacious, liberated awareness. Easier said than done, of course.

Looking deeply into our existence will not be unsympathetic toward our conventional reality, where we see ourselves as beings of different backgrounds, genders, cultures, sexualities, and generations. It was this duality of relative identities and universal truths that I, as a queer practitioner and ex-monastic, experienced quite powerfully when interpreting teachings on the four seals given by one of my primary mentors, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. Though he spoke about the four seals in a general way, his talk left room for profound personal reflection on how the roles and labels I have serve as an illustration for the material. In our conventional identities, we see the first three seals with greater precision.With that understanding, we then use the fourth one to see the flip side, sometimes described as the indivisible union of emptiness and luminosity that transcends conventions yet remains inseparable from them.

The First Seal: All Compounded Things Are Impermanent

Hearing that impermanence pervades all compounded things is challenging, not because it’s untrue but because it is true. If the world has cut us deeply with rejection—like it so often does with queer individuals—how can we accept that even our few loving connections will be taken away? How can we accept the inevitable separation from the body we’ve used to find those connections and with which we’ve worked so hard to make peace? We viscerally shy away from knowing that every relationship, even our life, will end.

Despite the resistance, we know that the threads holding the pieces of our lives together will inevitably snap, something new will form, and then again be replaced with another configuration of matter, energy, and awareness. It’s not easy to feel and know this without some sense of grief, but contemplating impermanence is supposed to bring about a level of sadness—a disappointment in our hungry grasping at permanence, in our inability to be like Queen Elsa in Frozen and simply “let it go.”  

I can only tolerate impermanence because I deliberately and continually remind myself of the naturalness of change. Like the changing of the season, my own life will endlessly go through cycles of change. I can find solace in the naturalness of it all and keep rolling along, however clumsily. Although this may seem like a simplistic understanding of the first seal, it is, perhaps, “good enough,” as Lama Thubten Yeshe used to say. Good enough to keep my vulnerable queer heart afloat: not yet radiantly enlightened, but certainly still alive.

The Second Seal: All Contaminated Things Are Dukkha 

Why does being in the world cut so deep? Why do our interactions with others often continue to slice our hearts like a sharp razor, even when we earnestly try to do our best? Our minds and the minds of all sentient beings are contaminated by primordial ignorance (avidya) and therefore accompanied by multiple types of dukkha or unsatisfactoriness. 

This contamination is not about violating the decrees of a higher authority or about systems of social oppression, which ultimately also stem from the fundamental polluting agent of ignorance. This ignorance—that which contaminates us—is our shared tendency to reify: to draw a thick line around ourselves and other phenomena, or subject and object. Living under the influence of this habit, we all construct thick walls and then harm each other and ourselves in endless cycles of attachment and aversion. 

The Third Seal: All Phenomena Are Empty and Selfless

Our attempt to overcome this contamination brings us to the third seal, which invites us to recognize all phenomena’s selfless and empty nature: the lack of independent existence. Since this truth goes strongly against our habituated perceptions, people often misunderstand this truth, which leads to additional harm for marginalized communities, adding insult to injury. It is too easy to say, “Everything is empty, so your queerness (race, gender, immigrant status, traumatic past) doesn’t matter.” Even though such a comment (perhaps well-meaning) tries, unskillfully, to point out the emptiness and grasping, it’s hurtful in its dismissiveness, reveals more about the speaker’s unchecked privilege, and in attempting to avoid the extreme of grasping, can also fall into the opposite extreme of nihilism.

Indeed, we are not merely our marginalized identities—but acknowledging those identities is essential, both in terms of our dukkha and as tools we can use to serve others. When doing Buddhist visualization practices—so beloved in the Indo-Tibetan lineage, where they form an integral part of Vajrayana practice—we keep the rules of the meditation intact: each Buddha figure appears in its color, with the correct number of arms, faces, and eyes. Arya Tara’s green form is visualized as green, and Medicine Buddha is imagined as radiantly sapphire-blue, without qualms about their unusual appearances or claims that the form is irrelevant. Things do not collapse into utter nihilistic chaos, even as they arise against the background of emptiness. So, why would our conventional roles no longer matter in the relational realm? I have repeatedly heard from my teachers of Madhyamaka philosophy that emptiness does not mean nothing matters. Since everything is empty, everything matters. Embodying the perfection of wisdom on the bodhisattva path by finding the balance between the relative and ultimate —between “I am definitely and defiantly queer” and “The empty self is not inherently queer”—requires a lifetime, or multiple lifetimes, to fully master.

The Fourth Seal: Nirvana is True Peace

Fully embodying the wisdom of knowing emptiness is nirvana. However, for many of us, the possibility of nirvana is merely a working hypothesis and something to be gradually tested through practice. So, how does the fourth seal provide peace right now? Is nirvana simply a promise for the distant future, like one day going to Heaven or one of the Buddhist pure lands?

Some Western teachers insist that all we have available are discrete moments of insight, which can never remove our underlying fallibility, no matter how meaningful. While the Indo-Tibetan tradition (or “Nalanda tradition,” as the Dalai Lama prefers to call it) that I’ve been trained in does not disagree with the persistent nature of our fallible traits, it does envision a complete potential transformation that transcends this life, even if it takes numerous lifetimes to achieve. Knowing which of these interpretations is correct requires carefully examining our reductionist and colonial conditioning, assessing our assumptions about the nature of consciousness, and, perhaps, a few encounters with realized practitioners of the highest caliber.

While all of that is underway, a beautiful element of the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) and Great Seal (Mahamudra) traditions is that they readily offer meaningful glimpses into our ultimate radiant nature. Gained through qualified guidance, careful preparation, and practice, these glimpses aren’t the same as full realization or nirvana but still provide essential insights. Je Tsultrim Zangpo, from the Dzogchen lineage, compares these insights into our pristine awareness to rays of light. Following the ray to its source, we arrive at the sun of complete freedom and experience the fourth seal in its full form.

Tenderness is an inseparable quality of our true nature.

This journey to the fourth seal is not only about exploring the qualities of awareness—at least not emotionally, since our hearts might hunger for more—but also about how tenderness is an inseparable quality of our true nature. The Dzogchen tradition teaches that our ultimate nature has three primary qualities: emptiness, luminous cognizance, and all-pervading spontaneous compassion. 

My limited conceptual understanding of spontaneous compassion (stemming from both emptiness and luminosity) had a powerful transformative effect on my practice and my way of being in this world. A few years into my decade-long monastic training, one of my primary teachers reminded me of the connection between the more effortful practices of the four immeasurables (brahmaviharah)—love, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—and the spontaneous, effortless warmth of our pristine nature. That reminder (less than a sentence in a short email) made me think: how can I work towards greater levels of trust towards this loving nature, which, in my case, manifests through the lens of my queer identity and has perhaps been obscured by all the heartbreak experienced so far? This question inevitably brings me back to the practical application of the four seals—a way of holding my mindfulness on them so they can transform my experience.

The four seals interpenetrate each other in our lives and can become a powerful emotional support system if we let them. For that, an excellent place to start is the fourth one: in seeking peace, let’s start with the promise of peace (nirvana). Let’s imagine that our ultimate nature is, as Dzogchen teaches, empty of inherent existence, radiantly cognizant, and boundlessly compassionate. When can that boundless compassion manifest and be strengthened? When we face change (first seal) and the knots of our contaminants—our afflictions—make us hurt ourselves and others (second seal). What helps us undo those knots? Deeper and deeper levels of knowing that things are not inherently existent. Understanding that things are, in the words of Suzuki Roshi, “not always so” can help us face life’s challenges with more compassion and respond in more wholesome ways.

Systems of oppression, acts of violence, the roughness of the fabric of existence, and even change itself can leave us aching, but by reflecting on the four seals, we can see what lies at the root of both pain and the tendency to create pain. Understanding the source of our suffering, expressed in the second seal, we seek the medicine of emptiness and find peace by experiencing our true nature.

Developing a trusting confidence in our true nature—our basic goodness—has been emphasized by many notable Buddhist teachers whom I’ve had the fortune to meet. This confidence does not come through simply telling yourself that “I’m a radiant magical being” or being reminded by others. It unfolds when we gradually realize the first three seals so that all of us—queer or not—can gracefully accept change, compassionately deal with our afflictions, and constantly remain aware that all things are radiantly empty. To whatever degree these four qualities seal the fabric of my life, I feel that my practice and existence—as an individual and a part of my communities—have been meaningful.

⧫

Watch a guided meditation from Michael Lobsang Tenpa on the second of the four seals below. 

The post Sealing Our Queer Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.